


Safe Distance

by Nomette



Series: long road behind [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Leigh's POV, M/M, OC-centric, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-05-19 21:23:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5981389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nomette/pseuds/Nomette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Are you compromised?<br/>Yes. </p>
<p>In the ashes of the old world, Leigh learns how to stop being a agent and start being a human being.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. compromise and confirm

**Author's Note:**

> Read Shot Through the Head before you read this to avoid spoilers.
> 
> This chapter takes place concurrently with Chapter 4 of Shot Through the Head. It goes into what Leigh's doing while MacCready and Cait mess around with the junkjet.

Leigh left the kid at his place looking frightened as a groom on his wedding day, his big blue eyes wide and shell-shocked. He kept glancing at Leigh when he thought Leigh wasn’t looking and then quickly looking away. Leigh wanted to tell him that it wasn't that bad, but hell, maybe it was that bad. Kid had been captured by raiders and had who knows what done to him, and he'd walked it off like a champ. In another world MacCready would have been that kid everyone made fun of in school, weedy and always reading comics, but in this world his itch to be useful had led him to the gun. Natural shot. Weird, that such a cute little thing had probably piled up more kills than any of Leigh's army friends.

Piper’s place was on the way out of Diamond City, but Leigh ignored it. Maybe that was his problem- too much time spent with other people, not enough time on his own. He needed to get his head straight.

He shouldn’t have gone back for MacCready. The kid was cute, and useful, but so were Piper and Preston and Curie. Leigh had spares. It was dangerous, dangerous as hell walking into that raider den, and the worst part was that it had been so easy. When you got away with things, it made you think that you could get away with it the next time, and you kept going, and that was how you got caught. Leigh had been avoiding getting caught his whole life and he wasn't about to start now.

He headed out of Diamond City, his power armor clanking and whistling with each step.

His backup set of power armor wasn’t as nice as his main, but the main was back at the damn shack and he didn’t feel like going back. If he saw a single raider on this trip he was going to shoot them full of drugs and dump them in the Deathclaw pit, then enjoy a smoke while they screamed.

Damn the Commonwealth and the whole fucking United States.

Leigh was in a bad mood, which meant that he missed his wife. If Davielle hadn’t been gone, the wasteland would have been a big playground, an easy con, but Davi was cold and stiff in her pod and Leigh was thigh deep in schemes with no one to smirk at him and tell him it was time to cash out and run. Mission control was down. (Leigh knew what the primary objective was, but he’d been ignoring it. Maybe it was time to stop pretending it wasn't there.)

A blip came up on Leigh’s radar, and he brought up his rifle and sighted down the scope. Grey streets, grey walls, trash, and a stray ghoul that had wandered dumbly into the street. Three shots from righteous authority, and it was a pile of ash. There was little to no chance that the damn thing would have anything useful on it. Waste of ammo. Easier than stabbing people in their sleep.

That was the problem with the wasteland- the fighting was hard, but the people were easy. Everyone was so desperate for a little help that they tripped over themselves to fall in love with him. Like MacCready, with his bad attitude and sweet face. Unconscious under the Med-X, with his hat off and his scruffy hair in his face, he’d looked like a high schooler and Leigh had suffered a brief but terrible attack of conscience. No good. Sentimentality was the enemy of good work, and Leigh had always done good work. He’d gotten the information out of the States and back to China, and China had turned the United States into so much dust.

“I was too successful,” Leigh said to the inside of his power armor. So successful I never got to go back to China. The last remained unspoken because even here, alone, out in the wasteland, Leigh had never shaken the habit of secrecy drilled into him by his training. He missed Davi again, more fiercely than the last time. Just the sight of her slim white hands would have cheered him up, the fierce way she moved her little body, as though in defiance of her illness.

Maybe the raiders were bad luck sent from her, a reminder that he hadn’t honored her like he ought to. A wife’s grudge- how can you kiss someone else, when you haven’t even killed Kellogg yet? Leigh could just imagine her tapping her foot, proud in her chair as a queen, and speaking in her beautiful french accent.

You have work to do.

A beep on Leigh’s radar, and a bullet came whizzing past his head. Leigh ducked behind a corner and switched out his rocket launcher. Really, it was like he was saving ammo. A few raiders wouldn’t take many missiles.

It took three. One for the first group, rushing down the gangway, a second for the backups on the ramparts, and a third in the base. Leigh strode through the smoky air feeling like a god, the hot thrum of violence sweet in his veins. The missiles had transformed the rampart into a flaming heap of rubble: he marched through it without a care for the flames. It occurred to him distantly that he was furious.

Why?

They hurt MacCready. Inappropriate reaction, he told himself. Step back. Calm down. Reassess. He continued down the block mechanically, and by the time he reached the river, his mind had cleared. He ran through the set of questions they had drilled into him when he was in training.

Are you compromised? Yes. Risk of impersonating raider was very high for low reward. However, future raider impersonations are now available as an option. Second and third times will be easier and less rushed.  

Excessive attachment to companion ill-advised. Solution: take some time off. Three weeks apart should be enough.

Are you still able to complete the main objective?

Objective unclear. Revise.

You know damn well what the objective is, you just don't want to do it because you're scared of raising a kid alone.

Too bad. Primary objective set: find Duncan. The end of the dialog triggered a sense of relief in Leigh. He’d been drifting since he came out of the vault, scrambling to get his information up to date. It had been nice- meeting Preston and Piper and Cait, wandering through the capital wasteland, but the little voice in the back of his head never forgot that he had unfinished business. Sometimes, when Piper's face caught the light the right way he remembered Davielle, in her full bitter glory, and it made his heart ache. He thought his parents would have approved of her, but it was impossible to know. The years had left him with only a few memories, the most prominent of which was their bodies being lowered into the ground.

His father had been a good man, a good ambassador to the United States, and in return they had killed him. They hadn't been interested in peace. Neither side had. Leigh had gone straight from the funeral into espionage training. On his fifteenth birthday they'd given him facial reconstruction surgery and a few weeks later he'd been in the United States as the sole survivor of a plane crash which killed the US ambassador and his entire family.

Good riddance.

Still. It wasn't exactly the kind of background that gave you qualifications to raise a kid. He would have been willing to stick it out with Davielle, but that was centuries ago. The kid had been her idea, and he'd never been able to say no to her. Fucking capitalism. Vault-tec was the best possible proof anyone could ask for that big companies were evil. If Davi had been alive... but she wasn't. It was time, past time. 200 years too late. Leigh set the mark on his Pip-Boy for Fort Hagen, and began to walk east.  

 

It was a little over two weeks before Leigh came back to Diamond City, the bones of Kellogg’s trigger finger rattling in his pack. Leigh had never been above taking trophies. Caught in the rush of bitter satisfaction at a job well done, he forgot that he’d left MacCready in his house until the door was already halfway open and he could hear laughter coming from inside the house.

He tapped the keys on the door a few times, just in case. It wasn’t profitable to surprise violent people, and all of Leigh’s friends were violent people, except for maybe Piper. He peered inside and caught sight of MacCready’s legs sticking off the couch. Leigh closed the door behind him and went in. MacCready was lying flat on his back, Cait looming above him. She’d managed to pin both of his arms with one of her hands and was mercilessly jeering him.

“Use your fucking arm strength, MacCready! If anyone ever actually pins you you’re dead meat.”

“Hey, boss,” MacCready said weakly.

“Hey!” Cait said, totally unconcerned, and punched MacCready in the stomach lightly. “Your boyfriend’s back, so now you can stop being sad.” She hopped off his chest, strode over to Leigh and caught him in a one armed hug.  “Not the same without ya around to make trouble,” she told him, smiling her troublemaker’s grin. Every step, every swing of her body was perfectly balanced, filled with the confidence of a fighter with perfect control of their body. Seeing Cait after a long absence was always startling, like going for a walk in the forest and abruptly coming face to face to face with a tiger.

“We should make trouble together sometime, then,” he told her. “You and MacCready can both come, and we’ll set the world on fire. You’ve got to promise to leave some stuff for us poor long range folks, though.” Cait laughed, her face bright as one of the models from the magazines.

“Ya wouldn't believe what he can do with a junkjet,” she said with a little tilt of her head in MacCready’s direction.

“Hmm,” said Leigh. On the quietest, stillest level of his mind, Leigh was a little dismayed to see her getting along with MacCready: the more people there were comparing notes on you, the more careful you had to be with your lies. The top level of Leigh was thrilled. Cait was beautiful, and MacCready was cute, and both of them were back alley thugs ready for violence whenever the occasion called. Leigh would be happy to provide a suitable occasion.

“I’ll leave the two of you to kiss and make-up,” Cait said with a wave of her hand, and sauntered out the door, taking a bottle of Leigh’s whiskey with her.

On the couch, MacCready had covered his face with his hat to hide his blush.

“Kiss and make-up, huh?” Leigh said to the hat.

“She’s smug ever since she caught me reading that Grognak comic,” MacCready muttered. “Any time she wants anything she just threatens to rip it up.” Leigh glanced worriedly at his collection, but Grognak seemed to be intact. MacCready caught him looking, and made a sympathetic face.

“I know, right?” Leigh sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“We’re such fucking nerds, I’m ashamed.” He flopped down on the couch next to MacCready, who straightened up at the brush of Leigh’s thigh against his foot like he’d been tapped with a stun baton.

“I got you a gift,” he blurted out.

“Oh?” said Leigh. MacCready mumbled something and looked down, shy as a girl in the backseat for the first time. Leigh leaned back and gave MacCready his space: better to let the kid come to him. How absurdly charming.

“It’s in the safe,” MacCready muttered. Leigh left him on the couch and opened up the safe. Inside, a full spread of ammo had been laid out like an assorted chocolate box, two of each, from 10mm to fusion cores. Somewhere inside Leigh, a little tick appeared next to MacCready’s name: useful resource, preserve if possible. Previous extraction retroactively validated. Leigh did not notice this calculus happening: he was thinking that MacCready must be half in love with him.

“You’re a marvel,” he said, and took out one of the fusion cores and weighed it in his hand.

“What is all of this for? Did you kill my dog?”

“No!” The kid looks devastated. “It’s- I wanted to thank you for saving me from the raiders. I shouldn’t have let myself get captured.”

“That was my fault,” Leigh said, turning. From the look on MacCready’s face, he didn’t agree. Leigh abruptly remembered the way he left, storming off without a word, not leaving a note or sending word… it must have seemed to MacCready that Leigh was furious.

“I wasn’t mad at you,” Leigh found the breath to say. “I was mad at myself. I was the one that distracted us, and you, you were hurt.” He crossed the distance between the safe and the couch and slid in next to MacCready.

“Then, why did you leave?”

“I had some personal stuff that I couldn’t wait on and I… I didn’t want to take you along. I thought you needed time to heal.” Leigh looked down, then darted his gaze up to MacCready. “I didn’t want you to get hurt on my command,” he said quietly. The first two lines were basically lies and misdirection, but the finish was completely true, and the finish was what caught MacCready.

“I don’t need to be coddled,” he said fiercely. “I killed a bunch of stuff to get that ammo, Leigh! Raiders, super mutants, a deathclaw, one of those ghouls that glows...just because I got hurt once, that doesn’t mean you should dump me! I started drinking when I was six, Leigh, I killed someone for the first time when I was ten!”

“Ten? That’s… that’s younger than me.” MacCready scowled.

“I would have thought that you would see that just because I’m not a fucking brotherhood of steel meathead that doesn’t mean I’m useless.”

“I don’t think you’re useless,” Leigh said blankly. “I like you. I’m sorry. I don’t know.” He rubbed his temples. The gesture shaded his eyes while he thought. “The whole thing with the raiders messed me up and I wanted some time alone. Quit yelling at me, MacCready, I’’m sorry I left you behind.” MacCready deflated.  

“Sorry,” he muttered, and sank into the couch.

“Me too,” Leigh offered after a pause. He contemplated the fusion core in his hand blankly, then leaned over and gave MacCready a quick peck on the cheek. MacCready gave him a shocked look, then grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him into a kiss. MacCready’s hesitations from before seemed to have evaporated- he kissed Leigh open mouthed and hungry and gorgeous, his hands slinking under Leigh’s shirt and along his sides. Leigh was vaguely conscious that he’d dropped the fusion core, but he didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was MacCready, his firm, warm weight under Leigh, the taste of his mouth. Leigh kissed his neck and MacCready tilted his head back, his eyes half-closed, breathing hard, lips parted, throat exposed. Leigh took a moment to admire the sight before continuing.

He unbuttoned MacCready’s shirt and ran his thumb down the long flat line of MacCready’s abs. MacCready was looking at him like he was ready to get down on his knees right then, and fuck, Leigh wanted to have him, to kiss him, to make him moan.

“May I?’ he said, slipping his finger under the band of MacCready’s boxers. It was only a little line of fabric, but Leigh felt like he’d cracked a masterwork safe. It took a moment for MacCready to register what Leigh was asking, but when he got it he wiggled his eyebrows at Leigh and made a big show of popping the front button on his jeans and pulling his boxers down.

“All yours, boss,” he said, and laughed at Leigh’s expression. Leigh pushed him up against the arm of the sofa and kissed him hard. MacCready kissed back eagerly and snuck his hand between the two of them to grind it against Leigh’s dick.

“Don’t be a tease,” Leigh said breathlessly.

“Me?” said MacCready reaching into the front of Leigh’s pants.  Leigh watched breathlessly as MacCready pulled down his boxers and took Leigh’s dick in hand and thought, fuck, I’m going to get hard everytime I see him pick up a gun. MacCready’s fingers were long and brown from days in the sun and they felt amazing sliding up and down Leigh’s cock.

“You,” said Leigh breathlessly. The world narrowed to nothing but the two of them on the couch- the little sounds MacCready was making, the look on his face, the pressure and rhythm of his hand on Leigh’s dick. Heat was pooling in his groin and rising through his body, making his groan as he struggled to keep his concentration, to keep touching MacCready, keep him biting his lip and making sounds in the back of his throat...

“Fuck,” said MacCready and went rigid, then came, trembling, in Leigh’s hand. Leigh watched his face, pinned by lust and curiosity. MacCready’s eyes were very blue. He glanced at Leigh and flushed, awareness flickering back into his face blink by blink. He put one warm hand on the back of Leigh’s neck and pulled him forward into a kiss. The other hand went into Leigh’s pants, stroking and sliding, unbearably close and hot. Leigh groaned and buried his face in the curve of MacCready’s neck, feeling his own finish building, sensation and desire pooled together until it was almost unbearable. One, two, three strokes of MacCready’s hand along his dick and Leigh shuddered and lost himself in hot, blind pleasure.

When he came back to himself, his head was leaning on MacCready’s shoulder and MacCready was idly stroking his side. MacCready’s neck smelled like sweat and sex and the warm smell of the man himself. Leigh idly considered going up the stairs to his bed, but dismissed it as too much effort. Instead, he pressed a kiss to the side of MacCready’s neck, right over the rapidly forming hickey, and smirked.

“So, I assume you changed your opinion of the sexy enforcer lifestyle?”

“Now you ask me,” MacCready said lazily. His voice came out slow and low, sexy. There were people Leigh had sex with once, to get it out of his system, and people who Leigh liked more and more every time they fucked. MacCready was in the second category, weirdly enough. Unaware of Leigh’s scrutiny, he tilted his head and smiled in the sweet, open way of someone who was post-coital and still a little silly with it. Leigh suspected the same dumb expression was also on his face. He ran his thumb along the line of MacCready’s fussy little beard because he could and felt a warm swell of affection.

“I’m not wearing a dress, but I’m, uh, open to further negotiations.”

“By negotiations you mean, sex, right?” Leigh asked. He had long since accepted that dangerous people got him hot, but it was more unusual for a hitch in someone’s voice to make him feel warm and possessive. Leigh studied MacCready, trying to find what it was he liked.

“What do you think?” MacCready asked. He paused and touched Leigh’s lip thoughtfully. “How do two men have sex, anyway? Aside from this. Blowjobs? Are blowjobs sex?” It was the contrast, Leigh decided, the divide between the cute, comic reading nerd and the nasty back-alley mercenary. It was interesting. The kid was two people, just like Leigh. He covered MacCready's hand with his own and gave him a sharp grin.

“I could give you a blowjob and we could find out,” Leigh suggested. MacCready’s flush was very appealing.

“Maybe later,” MacCready said, not quite able to hide his delight. “When I’m less covered in jizz. Gross, it’s on my shirt.”

“Disagree,” said Leigh. “I think you look very attractive with jizz on you.” He ran a finger from MacCready’s abs to the base of his dick and licked his finger, just to see MacCready flush and stare.

“I like you so much,” MacCready muttered. “I don’t know why you even had to ask.”

“You’re the one who said no to begin with,” Leigh pointed out. “Besides, people get up to all sorts of stuff they don't mean in a barracks, and I figure the whole world is a barracks these days.”

“I would pick you anywhere. And if we’re gonna fuck, you should probably call me RJ.” This was the opposite of maintaining proper distance, but Leigh couldn’t be bothered to care, not when MacCready- RJ was so cute and so damned useful.

“RJ,” Leigh said, and kissed him on the forehead. MacCready grinned and then snickered, his eyes on Leigh’s neck.

“You should see your own hickey,” Leigh told him, and went to find a washcloth. He retrieved a rag from the workbench and wiped off his front, then tossed it to MacCready.

“I usually wear a scarf anyway,” MacCready said, shrugging out of his shirt to better clean his front. Leigh watched him, enjoying the sight. When MacCready finished, Leigh grabbed him by the waist, sliding his hands along MacCready’s bare sides and kissed him.

“Hey, hey careful with the merchandise,” MacCready said, laughing.

“Cait’s right- you are terrible at close combat.” Leigh said, just to see MacCready scowl.

“I’m a sniper, and besides, I’d like to see you do better.”

“At least I have any arm muscle,” Leigh said, amused. MacCready was even skinnier under his big coat than Leigh had thought. “You need to eat more.”

“I’ve gained like ten pounds since I started rolling with you.”

“Good. You know, you’re always welcome to dig into my stash of cram.”

“You don’t need to take care of me, you know.”

“I want to,” Leigh said. This got him an unimpressed stare. “Jeez, ok. I’ll take you somewhere dangerous and you can kill people for me. You’re a picky date.” MacCready snickered.

“That’s more like it.” Leigh kissed him, then bullied him into cooking lunch while Leigh shaved and set up his kit for the next expedition. He’d set up a corner with a mirror. When he was satisfied that MacCready wasn’t looking, he fished Kellogg’s fingerbones out of his pack and set them aside. It had been bloody work to shave them down and then boil the remains, but Leigh was a patient man.

Are you compromised? His reflection in the mirror asked him. You were supposed to avoid this. It’s inadvisable to get so attached to someone, he thought. The voice sounded like his old camp instructor. But I like him. He’ll make a good companion, like Davi did. He’s useful. Besides, he’s not loyal to any other faction. As long as I don’t do anything too crazy, he won’t turn on me. He’ll be mine. The echo of MacCready’s voice flashed into his head, saying ‘I would pick you anywhere.’

Are you still able to complete the mission? Leigh felt a sudden stab of anger. The mission is over, he thought. Kellogg is dead. The United States is dead, and China probably is as well. This was not a sufficient answer for the ghosts in Leigh’s head. MacCready was calling for him in the kitchen: Leigh yelled that he’d be there in a moment. I can complete the mission, he thought, looking into the mirror. I’ll find Shaun. There was no response from the mirror. Leigh finished shaving, then joined MacCready in the kitchen, leaving the finger bones on the counter.  


	2. real love don't go quiet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MacCready was standing against the far wall, a pistol pointed at Leigh’s face. He looked awful, which was to say that he looked more or less like he usually did. It hurt to look at the hard expression on his face and the unwavering way he held his gun. Leigh had thought, despite the all the evidence to the contrary, that MacCready was sweet. That MacCready didn’t really have it in him to shoot Leigh. But the cold-eyed person in front of him had come to this meeting ready to kill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place concurrently with Ch 7 of "Shot Through the Head" and will not make much sense if you haven't read that first.  
> TW for VERY SERIOUS suicidal ideation in this chapter.

Leigh stumbled into Diamond City as the last rays of light were fading over the stadium walls. He’d thrown up on the way back to the city until there was nothing left in his stomach but nausea. He went straight to his house, locked the door behind him and activated the turrets. Then, and only then, did he allow himself to take off his power armor. Nausea was heavy in his stomach: when he exited his power armor, his knees wobbled, suddenly too weak to carry him. He took off his gun and armor, tossed them on the floor, and crawled up the stairs to his bed, where he lay, shivering and unable to sleep.

Two thoughts kept circling through his head in a panicked loop: one, that he’d been compromised, he’d been discovered, he’d been found out. Someone knew. The idea made him lightheaded. The second thought was this: China was gone. He’d thought so, of course, from the moment he exited the vault to find the corpse of Sanctuary Hills. But it was one thing to think so, and one thing to know. For over a decade, dedication to home had powered Leigh through the training camps, through the war, through the ambushes and the politics and the unbearable lies, and now it was all gone. Ash in the wind. Leigh had moved to a different country, lied to his wife, killed his fellow soldiers, sabotaged projects and people that he liked and respected, and all for nothing.

A headache was beginning to join the fever. Leigh grabbed a stimpack out of his bedside medicine kit and jabbed the needle listlessly into his arm, but it didn’t do anything. Leigh stared at the stimpack and squeezed the pack. Nothing.

“For fuck’s sake,” Leigh muttered, and gave himself a dose of Med-X. The pain faded, and Leigh faded into an exhausted sleep. If there were nightmares, he did not remember them, though he woke several times, sweating, unsure what was making his heart pound.

It was noon the next day before he realized that he was dying slowly of radiation poisoning and all the Rad-X was down the stairs in his suit. In the army they’d drilled him back to front on the symptoms of radiation poisoning, and he had all of them: nausea, fever, headache, weakness, fatigue, dizziness and disorientation. Damn those ghouls, and damn Leigh for not having the courage to just put the shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger instead of heading down into the submarine. Of course, Leigh could still fix it. The remaining Med-X would take care of the pain, and he could close his eyes and join Davielle wherever the dead went.

A memory, cutting in through the pain: Davielle spitting blood into the sink, then wiping a hand contemptuously across her face. Leigh had been younger then, and stupid. He’d asked if it hurt, and Davi had laughed at him.

“Of course it hurts,” she’d said. “I’m dying. Who cares?” She’d washed her hands and shook them to sprinkle off the water, and Leigh had fallen in love, just a little. There was no pain like illness, and Davi had been sick until the day Kellogg opened the cryochamber and killed her. Infuriating, for someone who had fought so hard to die like that, in a stupid accident.

He’d chosen her for her brilliance, her discretion, her bitter hatred of the united states, and the fact that she was likely to die soon, and then he’d never have to marry again. But she had lived, despite everything, and pioneered a number of medical procedures related to her illness. As Leigh had fallen in love with her, he’d clung to one thing: if Davi ever found out he was a spy, she wouldn’t confront him. She wouldn’t even tell. And if she did choose to tell, she would go straight into government protection, and Leigh would never be in the position where he had to put a gun to her pretty head and pull the trigger.

A wave of pain passed through his head, like the pulse from an exploding turret, or the sound of gun going off right next to your head. A dip in the pain, like the ocean drawing back for a big wave, and then another pulse. A pounding headache, Leigh thought in the lull, vaguely conscious that he had a death grip on the sheets.

“Get up,” Davi said. There was a reason this was impossible, but Leigh couldn’t remember what it was.

“Get up, you lazy ass.” It was impossible to forget that Davi was Canadian, because her native language shone through every syllable of her voice. Leigh smiled affectionately and rolled off the bed, vaguely conscious that he’d hit the ground with a thump. He let Davi bully him off the bed and down the stairs, his head throbbing in time to distant music, and crawled to the edge of his power armor. It took the last of his strength to pull himself to his feet and take a bottle of Rad Away from the helmet. How many pills were you supposed to take? Leigh couldn’t remember, but he figured he was probably doing real bad, so he finished off the bottle. Swallowing the pills dry made him want to vomit, but he forced himself to breathe in short, shallow breaths until the feeling passed and he faded into unconsciousness on the floor.

The mega surgery sign made Leigh’s head hurt, but he persevered. He kept forgetting that there was a pistol in his hand and startling himself when the barrel bumped against his thigh. The doctor was at the door: Leigh grabbed him by the throat and shoved him through the door, then barred it behind the two of them.

“I need you to fix my face,” he said, and the words came out slurred. “Down the stairs! Do it.” They stumbled down, Leigh pitching and swaying in time with the room.

“--wrong with your face?” the doctor asked. Leigh was sitting in the chair, but he didn’t remember sitting down. Time had skipped like an old record.

“Look at it,” Leigh said. “They’re going to catch me. What will my wife think?” It was on the word wife that he realized he’d been speaking in chinese, and this stupid American couldn’t understand a word he was saying. What had he been saying? Had he been speaking in chinese the entire time?

“Can you understand me?” he asked.

“Yes,” the doctor said, and clicked the wrist restraints shut. Crocker. His name was Crocker. Leigh had been investigating something about him with Nick, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Crocker picked up Leigh’s pistol and aimed it at Leigh’s face, then pulled the trigger. Click. There were no bullets in the gun.

“Hmm,” said the doctor, and took something off the surgical tray. “I doubt this will hurt very much in your current state.” The needle went into Leigh’s arm, and the cool punch of Med-X flooded Leigh’s system.

“Actually, it might be better to change the eyes before, in case they find the body,” Crocker said, and glanced at something out of Leigh’s range of view. Leigh tried to look, but his head was strapped into the surgery chair. The lights dimmed.

Leigh remembered two things afterwards: the slice of the laser across his forehead, and the crunch his thumb made when he dislocated it to get out of the chair. There was a large mirror on the wall, splattered with blood. Leigh ignored it. He stumbled up the stairs and out into Diamond City, where he caught one of the security guards by the shoulder and spoke to them earnestly.

“Excuse me, but I think I’ve dislocated something. Can you help?” The guards glanced at each other.

“Do you speak that language?”

“No idea.”

 

The events as they were explained to Leigh went like this: Leigh, high on a combination of Med-X, Rad-X, and radiation sickness, had stumbled into Doc Crocker’s basement in the early hours, as Doc Crocker had been dismembering Earl Sterling. Doc Crocker had persuaded Leigh into the chair and started to change his face, but Leigh had broken his thumb to get out and stabbed the doctor to death, then stumbled into Diamond City.

“He was trying to murder you, so I wouldn’t feel too bad about it,” Nick said, and handed Leigh a bottle of water. They were sitting in Diamond City lock-up, Leigh in a jail cell in his boxers, periodically vomiting into a bucket, and Nick on the other side of the bars. “I’d like to know how you got so messed up on Rad-X, though.”

“Ferals,” Leigh said in chinese, and sighed. He really didn’t want to speak english.

“Like I said, pretty damn messed up. Doctor Sun thinks you would have bought the farm even without Crocker if you hadn’t stumbled into the square. Good thing you did.”

“Thanks, Nick,” Leigh mumbled.  Some of the stuff he remembered contradicted Nick’s account, but he didn’t want to talk anymore than strictly necessary.

“You can speak! I was starting to wonder if all the chems had fried your brain.”

“Picked up radiation off some ferals. MacCready... I got home, fell asleep, woke up and took some Rad-X, then stabbed a guy to death, I guess. How long am I going to be in here?” It wasn’t very hard to sound miserable and guilty. Leigh was miserable and guilty, just not about some stupid doctor.

“Piper’s harassing the mayor right now. Travis and Bobrov will vouch for you, and I’ve put together a file on the case. You’ll be out soon. Where’s MacCready, by the way? You two went out together, last I heard.” Leigh slumped down in his chair.

“Come on, Leigh. Tell me what happened.”

“He’s in Goodneighbor,” Leigh muttered. “That’s what he said. We had a fight.”

“Do you want me to find him?” Leigh thought about it, then nodded.

“Can I write him a note?” Nick got him some paper, and Leigh wrote out a note. It took a while. His hand kept trembling. Leigh’s father had always said that handwriting revealed a person’s true character, which was a horrible lie, because Leigh had beautiful, clear handwriting.  

He folded the note in half, then handed it to Nick.

“That kind of fight, huh?”

“Yeah.”

 

Piper got Leigh out of lockup the next day and talked at him until he finally gave up on trying to be polite and asked her to go away. When that didn’t work, he retreated into his house and bolted the door shut behind him, ignoring Piper’s yelling. He could bribe her with information later, if there was a later.

The pill bottle was still on the floor next to his power armor: Leigh threw it in the trash and sent up a silent prayer of thanks to Davi for helping him despite the fact that he was a shitty husband, then flopped down on the couch.

Now what?

Current status: fucked up on radiation, fucked up the mission, fucked up with MacCready, everything fucked. Leigh finished the bottle of water and tossed it at the wall, watched it bounce.

Fuck.

In times of trouble, Leigh had been taught to go back to the basics, then figure it out from there. He took a deep breath, then started at the beginning.

Are you compromised? Yes. The thought of MacCready made his chest tighten and his stomach roil. Better to return to that one.

Can you still complete the objective?

China was a burning hole in the ground. Leigh started to laugh, feeling the complete uselessness of what he was trying to do like knives scraping against his skin.  

Objective unclear. Revise. What do you want to do?

Kill MacCready, get on the sub and sail for China. The thought made his chest ache: it felt familiar and foreign all at once, like hearing the name of someone he’d loved years ago. He shoved the feeling down and forced himself to examine the thought.

Why should he kill MacCready? To maintain his cover. But his cover didn’t matter anymore, did it? There were no Americans left to report him. Despite his blue eyes, and his all-american love of comic books, money and guns, MacCready wasn’t the enemy. He was a wastelander. There was no reason to kill him, even if the thought of someone knowing he was a spy made Leigh’s chest bubble with panic.

What was the objective? he asked himself again. Two options surfaced: to take the submarine and go to China with Zao, or to go back to Goodneighbor and continue to search for the Institute. He thought about his wife, but when he tried to picture her face, he kept remembering MacCready’s outrage, the way his voice had cracked on Lucy’s name.

Three observations, all in conflict. First, Leigh owed it to his wife to destroy the Institute. Second, Leigh owed it to his country to try and sail back and rebuild it. Third, inescapable and unfortunate: Leigh was, at this moment, incapable of doing either of those things. The Institute would almost certainly be a suicide run, and even if it wasn’t, it would require help. It would require a partner, and Leigh had reached such a point of moral weakness and uselessness that he wasn’t going to be able to abandon a partner, even for a chance to go home at last.  Last, and unfortunately relevant: going home to China, would not, in fact, be going home. Leigh’s home city had gone up in flames. There was no one at all waiting for Leigh in China, and possibly no one in China at all. Something wet landed on Leigh’s shirt with a soft plop. Leigh looked up to the roof to confirm that it wasn’t raining and realized that he was crying.

He sat in the cold of his unlit room, water dripping onto his clothes, unsure what to do. His throat ached. Was it permitted for his cover to cry? It didn’t matter any more. Everything was permitted, because there was no one left to discover or hide him.

The game was over, and they had lost.

 

It was days before Leigh could make himself leave the house, and he felt every moment of it. The grief was worse than when his parents had died, worse than when Davielle had died, because then there had been something to do, someone he could hunt down and dismember. The pain was so staggering that Leigh halfway couldn’t believe it was really happening: he kept checking to see if he still felt the same way, convinced that the fog had to lift soon, but it droned on and on. He took to keeping a count in his head, until that too became a torment, counting the seconds and hoping that time would somehow skip forward to a time when he’d feel different.

The day before the appointment with MacCready dawned, and Leigh grabbed his pistol, cleaned off his power armor, and chugged down some whiskey with a sense of relief.  Finally, something to do. He left early in the morning, headed to Goodneighbor and paid for a room at the Hotel Rexford, then went down to Doctor Amari’s basement, where Valentine confirmed that MacCready was alive and he’d gotten Leigh’s note, but nothing else. Judging by his careful manner, Valentine had decided to put Leigh under investigation, but Leigh was too tired to deflect or really care. It was enough to know that MacCready was alive and Leigh would see him tomorrow. He let Amari strap him into the machine and wandered through Kellogg’s memories in a kind of stunned haze.

Apparently mercenaries with dead wives were a dime a dozen in the Commonwealth, as though all the creativity had gone out of the world when the bombs fell and all humanity was now condemned to play through the same stories over and over until they died and became another pair of decorative skeletons, props in the background of what had become someone’s else’s play.

Leigh surfaced from the slog of Kellogg’s memory with a headache and a dry mouth.

“You’ve been under for almost a day,” Amari informed him.

“Shit,” said Leigh. It hurt to talk. He chugged down a container of dirty water and raced off to the Rexford. It occurred to him in the lobby that he really didn’t know what to say to MacCready. He’d just have to wing it. The last few steps towards the door felt like getting ready to airdrop out of a copter into a hot zone, anticipation mixed in with dread. The knock on the door had the same vertiginous sensation as a drop, terror mixed in with relief. Wherever this was going, the final descent had begun at last, and Leigh would be free one way or another soon. He gripped the doorknob and opened the door slowly.

MacCready was standing against the far wall, a pistol pointed at Leigh’s face. He looked awful, which was to say that he looked more or less like he usually did. It hurt to look at the hard expression on his face and the unwavering way he held his gun. Leigh had thought, despite the all the evidence to the contrary, that MacCready was sweet. That MacCready didn’t really have it in him to shoot Leigh. But the cold-eyed person in front of him had come to this meeting ready to kill.

“If you’re a synth, you’re not doing a very good job of hiding it,” MacCready said. Leigh had forgotten about the scar on his forehead. He touched the ridge absently and then put his hand down before MacCready could get nervous and shoot him.

“I had a run-in with the facial surgeon,” he said with a smile that he didn’t really feel. “Zero stars. The service was awful.”

“Can the chit-chat. What do you want, Leigh?” When MacCready spoke, the pistol moved slightly, but not enough. If Leigh charged him, MacCready would paint his brains across the seedy hotel room, and wouldn’t that be a way to go?

“I wanted to see you,” said Leigh, aware that he had come the room to make some kind of decision, and he hadn’t made it yet. MacCready raised his pistol even with Leigh’s forehead and put his finger on the trigger.

“I suggest you find a less ambiguous way to answer my question.”

“I’m sorry,” Leigh said, and breathed out, trying to steady his nerves. Any kind of lie would be taken extremely badly, but Leigh wasn’t very good at being honest. He decided to start with the basics. “I’m sorry for lying to you. It’s… an old habit. I’m sorry about your wife, and your kid. I’m sorry about the submarine. I didn’t realize… I didn’t know you disliked ghouls so much. I’m sorry I lost it in the middle of the street.” There. That was fairly exhaustive.

“Okay,” said MacCready, face still hard. “That and twenty caps gets me a drink. What do you want, Leigh?” Leigh realized that he had made a mistake in setting up this meeting. MacCready was too angry with him to listen to anything Leigh had to say, and Leigh wasn’t even sure he didn’t want to kill MacCready. Fine.

Let MacCready make the decision.

Leigh took a step forward.

“Don’t come any closer,” MacCready said. Leigh kept walking, hands at his sides, eyes trained on MacCready’s face. There was a moment- a twitch, when Leigh thought that MacCready had already shot him and he just hadn’t felt it yet, and then Leigh was at arm’s length, the pistol almost against his stomach.

I guess I’m going to live, he thought. There was a knife up his sleeve- he could feint to one side, get the gun out of the way, cut MacCready open. He wanted to, a little, but not enough. Not as much as he wanted to apologize and kiss him. Strange.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said at last. He was close enough to see the flinch when he spoke. MacCready must have thought Leigh was about to kill him, but he wasn’t running. “The thing on the bridge was... reflexive. When you live undercover for ten years, maintaining your cover turns into a thing you do without really thinking about it.” The pistol wavered and then shot forward, pushing uncomfortably into Leigh’s stomach. If Leigh tried to move it, he’d almost certainly get shot. Point to MacCready.

“Well, did you rethink it?” MacCready asked scornfully.

“MacCready, darlin’, walking up to an armed man is no genius strategy for not getting shot. I just wanted to explain a little.” MacCready scowled at him, but his face opened a little when Leigh called him darling.

“Some explanation,” MacCready said, but he was looking upwards at Leigh’s face instead of at his hands. “It really didn’t occur to you that shooting me over some irrelevant bullshit that happened two hundred years ago is just stupid?” This was what came of losing the war: Leigh’s whole past, the United States, the army, all of it was now just “irrelevant bullshit” that some mouthy mercenary brat could dismiss in a single second. Strangely, Leigh felt a thread of affection wound in with the irritation. MacCready really didn’t care about anything Leigh had done.

“I’m irrelevant bullshit that happened before the bombs felt,” Leigh pointed out.

“You’re relevant. You’re standing in front of me with a knife up your sleeve.” Leigh lifted his hands slowly and smiled.

“I’m standing in front of you unarmed,” he said, and caught MacCready’s eyes with his own. MacCready flushed. “I’m didn’t come here to hurt you,” Leigh said, and it became true when he said it. An observation: just being around MacCready made it easier for Leigh to think, the sight of him lightening the despair that had been weighing down Leigh’s thoughts. “I’m running out of ways to apologize, so won’t you please come back with me?”

“Why?” MacCready said softly. “Why do you want me?” I need your help, Leigh wanted to say, but that wasn’t right, even if it was true. I need you. Even more useless. It seemed stupid, insane even, that Leigh hadn’t thought of this before coming, but he hadn’t been thinking, really. Just walking on auto-pilot, step following step.

“You’re the only one I have left,” Leigh said. It wasn’t a very good pitch: too selfish, too true, but it was the least awful thing he could think to say. MacCready frowned, contemplating, and then visibly decided that Leigh was lying.

“I bet you say that to everyone,” MacCready said, staring defiantly upwards at Leigh. This close, he had to tilt his head back to look at Leigh. So small and so vicious, but when Leigh touched his face he leaned slightly into Leigh’s hand like he didn’t realize he was doing it. The touch made Leigh’s throat tight with an awful mixture of delight and misery.

“I do,” Leigh choked out, and it felt like admitting to his whole life, like a confession extracted after months of torture. “But I mean it when I say it to you.” His voice cracked. “Please.”

“I can’t,” MacCready said, and it wasn’t the sort of refusal that was negotiable. Was this some sort of cosmic punishment for his years of lying?  He’d confessed and meant it, really meant it, and not been believed.

“Then just shoot me,” Leigh said, and leaned in, put his weight on the gun and pushed until the two of them were standing chest to chest, almost touching. “I’ve lost my wife. I’ve lost my son. I’ve lost my country. Please. Don’t leave me. Come with me.” Leigh hadn’t understood the point of beginning before this point, not really. No one ever got what they wanted by begging, but that wasn’t why you begged. You begged because your pride was the last thing you had, and you were willing to throw that too on the pile in the hopes it would get you the thing you wanted, the thing you couldn’t live without.

“Give me three weeks,” MacCready said. Three weeks? Leigh would be dead in three weeks, or insane, or on his way to China. What did MacCready need three weeks for? To run? He would have suggested a smaller period of time if he’d been planning to run, to make it less obvious. If he’d been planning to run, he wouldn’t even have come to this meeting.

“For what?”

“I have debts to pay,” MacCready said, with a hard line to his mouth that told Leigh any further questions would be useless. What would MacCready be so touchy about?

“Your son?” Leigh guessed, and MacCready jammed the barrel of his pistol into Leigh’s stomach. At this angle, the bullet would go upwards, through Leigh’s stomach and lungs, before coming out of his upper back and blowing out his spine. Leigh’s hands had been on MacCready’s shoulders- it was the work of an instant to flip his knife out and hold it against MacCready’s neck. The sight made his throat ache.

“Wouldn’t that be a sight? The two of us dead on the floor of a shitty hotel. Like one of those old pulp novels.” MacCready was close enough to kiss, and when Leigh leaned in he tilted his head up and closed his eyes like he’d been waiting for Leigh. Maybe he had. Leigh felt a powerful regret and tenderness when he kissed MacCready, the first real emotion to penetrate the frozen wall around his mind since he’d heard the bad news on the sub. This person, this small, vicious person with his gun jammed in Leigh’s stomach was Leigh’s partner, was Leigh’s, and Leigh had hurt him.

Leigh leaned in slightly and MacCready opened his mouth and tipped his head back and for a brief moment Leigh forgot about the world outside.

“No,” MacCready said, and brought his chin down slightly.

“No,” repeated Leigh, feeling faintly stunned. His hand trembled slightly and he forced it to go still.

“Three weeks,” MacCready repeated. His face had changed with the kiss. Instead of pushing Leigh away, his facial expression was pleading.

“Will you come back?” Leigh asked, his voice caught in his throat, embarrassingly desperate. In response MacCready leaned in and kissed Leigh hard, with teeth, the kind of kiss that was a filthy promise. When he broke the kiss he held Leigh’s eyes and then stepped backwards, out of the range of Leigh’s knife.  

“I’ll see you before you see me,” he said, and closed one eye, like he was sighting down an imaginary scope. It was the most alarming wink Leigh had ever received and he felt dimly that he’d been outmaneuvered, although he wasn’t sure when. It was oddly satisfying. He smiled, saluted, and left. The stretched, awful grief in his chest wasn’t any smaller or less painful. But there was something else now, something that gleamed like a single bullet in an empty box of ammunition.  It would be enough. Leigh would make it be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Radiation poisoning: don't get it.  
> \- In my experience, the more miserable people get, the more dramatic they are. Thus, Leigh making a solid effort to be crowned this year's commonwealth drama queen.  
> \- In case anyone is curious, I picture Leigh as looking like Godfrey Gao. Look it up. Your eyes will thank you.  
> -Thanks to everyone for the nice comments they've been leaving!!! Nothing motivates me to write more.


	3. 21 days/108 hours

Hour 1, 21 days remaining.

Objective set: survive until the meeting with MacCready.

Leigh was so gutted by the confrontation at the hotel that he didn’t realize he was being followed until halfway to Diamond City. MacCready would have noticed instantly, but Leigh had always relied on his power armor to tell him if someone was sneaking up on him. Without it, he reflected gloomily, he was just one miserable fucker with a couple of toy guns. Well, and a missile launcher, and enough chems to open a pharmacy. Leigh snorted at his own melodrama and kept walking.  

It was strange: a day ago he would have been grateful for a bullet in the back, and now it felt like a problem instead of an answer. He took a sharp right at the next corner, grateful that one of the endless brotherhood patrols had decided to fly near him: the sound of the vertibird blocked out his footsteps. He stopped, took out his shotgun, aimed it at the corner, and waited. One, two, three, and then someone peeked around the building and froze.

“I don’t suppose you’d believe I was just walking this way?” It was the man in the sunglasses Leigh had caught that one time in Diamond City.

“No chance,” said Leigh, and lowered his shotgun so it was even with the man’s center of mass. “You couldn’t have caught me in a worse mood. No bullshit. What do you want?” The man glanced upwards, to where a pair of birds were sitting on the wire above them.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to have this conversation somewhere a little less...open. Not that I don’t need to work on my tan, but sometime pasty skin is just the price you gotta pay.” The man was pale, with red eyebrows just visible above his sunglasses. Leigh doubted he’d ever tanned in his life. Leigh pulled the trigger, sending one of the birds to the ground in a splatter of blood and feathers and the other into the air, flapping and cawing.

“You have a few sentences to convince me. Talk.”

“Relax, man. A little birdie told me you were looking for the Institute.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. “I know some people who’re also interested, you dig? Let us know if you’re ever feeling more talkative.” Leigh snorted and put the card away.

“Don’t let me see you around.”

 

Day 1, 20 days remaining.

Hangman’s Alley wasn’t Leigh's first choice for places to repair his suits, but he was avoiding Piper and Preston, which ruled out Diamond City and the Castle. The miserable, buzzing despair which had lifted slightly after the meeting was returning in full, but Leigh persevered. The work helped. Leigh had done field repairs of power armor through five brutal years of the Anchorage campaign, worked through bombing raids and insurgencies, worked with a bullet in his arm and his friend’s head splattered across his shirt. Whatever else was happening, the suit was the suit: if you patched it right, and kept your materials clean, it would work.

Leigh felt something approaching satisfaction when he finished, the first feeling to pierce the fog of despair since he’d left MacCready. It was good to have work again. The Commonwealth was large: Leigh would just have to find three weeks of busywork to keep himself together until MacCready came back. He swallowed down the pang that came with the thought of MacCready out there in his thin coat, fighting god knows what without Leigh- but he’d be in Leigh’s power armor, at least, and Cait would be with him. Leigh’s habitual power armor was plated to hell and back- it would keep MacCready safe. It had to.

Leigh shoved away the thought of MacCready’s corpse lying somewhere, the sun slowly bleaching the color from his clothes until he became another skeleton, and forced himself to return to his work. It was almost a physical effort to make himself focus on gathering supplies, like swimming against some fast and vicious current, but he made himself do it. Armor, done. Next, Stimpaks, Rad-X, Rad Away. It was like being in the army again, shell-shocked and running on empty. Don’t think, just work. He began to pick out what he needed, despair close on his shoulders, but not heavy enough to crush him, not yet.

 

Day 3, 18 days remaining.

The Glowing Sea was shit.

 

Day 4, 17 days remaining.

The Glowing Sea was really shit. The lighting was shit, the animals were shit, the landscape was shit, and the tingling smell of decay made his nose itch and burn. A low moan rang in his ears, and then Strong was charging over the hill, staggering ferals with each blow from his fist. Leigh reloaded his shotgun and followed. Somewhere between the second and third deathclaw they’d killed, he’d decided to live. Combat had a way of making it clear to you what your priorities were; Leigh’s objectives were clear again at last. He pumped a blast into the nearest ghoul, kicked a second away from him, shot it in the head, and reloaded. Objective one: survive until meeting with MacCready.

Strong howled and smashed his fist into a ghoul, caving in their skull with a meaty thud. Objective two: reach the Institute and kill every last bastard inside. That was what all of this was for, the trek, the deathclaws, the radscorpions. For Davi. She was going to get one hell of a funeral pyre. Leigh shot another two ghouls and reloaded, backpedaling, then finished a third. Strong killed the last. Leigh stood a moment, his pulse thundering in his ears, then exhaled and took a step forward. They were almost there.

Virgil turned out to be a monster starving for the sound of a human voice; Leigh only had to speak to him about nuclear cores for a few minutes and he laid out all his information like a feast.

“Did you ever hear about a boy named Shaun?” he asked as the conversation wrapped up, curious to see what Virgil would say.

“Who?” Virgil asked, and peered at him. Leigh had taken off his helmet.

“The Institute took my son, Shaun.” Virgil looked at him a moment more, then laughed, wild, hysterical laughter.

“I remember Shaun,” he said, still laughing. “I’m sure you’ll find your son.” For a moment, in the dim lights of the cave, Leigh had the skin crawling sensation that was Davi standing in the corner just behind him, smoking a cigarette and coldly watching him work. Like many people whose work relied profoundly on luck, Leigh was superstitious, and he never forgot that only luck had spared him from Kellogg’s bullet. He thanked Virgil for the blueprints and hurried from the cave, but the sensation of being watched chased him all the way out of the glowing sea.

 

Day 6, 15 days remaining

The Courser was fast: Leigh’s Fat Man was faster.

“Overkill much?” Preston asked after the dust had settled. The Courser was a pile of cauterized flesh and twitching wires: Leigh tipped it over with one foot and cut the chip out with his knife. One of the Gunner corpses on the way up had been a young man with sandy brown hair and a familiar hat.

“I have all these nukes just lying around, Preston. If I save them for a special occasion, I’ll never get to use them.”

“Fair enough,” Preston said, sounding like he wanted to laugh. Talking to Preston was like easy mode when it came to dealing with people: he was easy to charm and hard to offend, making him perfect for Leigh’s frazzled nerves.

A crash made both of them look up: the captured synth was pounding on the glass of her cage.

“I’ll get this,” Leigh said, heading over to the computer. A few clicks, and the door slid open. Leigh caught the girl by the shoulders: she was hysterical, ready to run. “Shhh. Take deep breaths. You’re fine. They’re not going to catch you. Okay? They’re not going to catch you.”

The girl looked at him, big tears rolling down her face, and nodded, face white. There was a knife down the back of her shirt, and a gun or something else in her sleeve: she’d been holding out on her captors.

“Did you know he was going to come after you when you let the gunners catch you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” When she stepped away, she tried to grab for the grenade on his belt: Leigh caught her hand.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I thought they would be able to stop him,” she said, a fresh round of tears falling down her face. That, at least, was probably true.

“And now they’re all dead,” said Leigh, matter-of-factly. “Good for you. Gunners are assholes. Don’t ever pull this kind of stunt again, and stay the hell away from all of my settlements until you’ve gotten a face change. Take this.” He grabbed several fisfuls of caps from his pocket, not wanting to bother counting them out, and dumped them into a hat. At the last moment he remembered the card the spooks had given him, and dug it out. He hadn’t looked at it before: there was a map to the ‘Old North Church.’ Interesting.

“Thank you,” the girl said. Leigh flicked her in the forehead.

“Good luck.”

 

Day 9, 14 days remaining

Leigh wasn’t familiar enough with the kind of coding the Institute used to be able to decode the Courser chip; he was beginning to suspect that he’d need specialized equipment to get anything out of it. Piper cornered him as he was making his daily noodle run, kidnapped his noodles, and led him back to her house.

Leigh went. He could have stolen his food back, but he’d have to talk to Piper sooner or later, and it might as well be now. They sat at the low table, Piper with a pen and paper, Leigh with his noodles.

“”Put those away,” Leigh said, tired already. “I might be able to manage talking to a friend, but I can’t deal with the press.”

‘It’s just edits, Leigh. I’m writing an article about the rise of the minutemen, what with all the new settlements lately.” As Piper pieces went, that was practically fluff, and almost certainly designed to cheer Leigh up.

“Sounds good,” Leigh said, and started on his noodles. Piper was kind enough to wait until he was mostly done before beginning her interrogation.

“Any progress with the chip?”

“Not really,” Leigh said, lifting the bowl to his mouth.

“Cait came back today.” Piper said, and Leigh nearly choked. “MacCready’s not with her. What happened between the two of you, Blue?” Piper made Leigh nervous, and this was why: she couldn’t be intimidated, redirected or evaded. It was just raw skill: his ability to lie versus her ability to catch him. In the old days, Leigh would have arranged for her to ask a question bigger than her ability to answer, and said something nice at the funeral. The good ole US of A was never all too fond of snoopers.

“I found out that the city where I grew up was destroyed in the bombs. Direct hit. I didn’t take it too well.” The memory made Leigh’s cheeks hot with embarrassment. “We had a fight, and he left. Asked me for three weeks to get something done. Getting medicine for his son, I think.” MacCready’s dedication to his family was admirable, but it made Leigh’s guts squirm with embarrassment if he thought about it too long. All the resources in the world, and MacCready was doing a better job at taking care of his kid than Leigh.

“No kidding. Cait told me MacCready was just about convinced that you were going to kill him.” Was that what this is about? Piper poking him to see if he was safe? Leigh exhaled, stalling for time, and decided that he was too tired to fence with Piper. He studied her neck, thinking of the little pistol in her coat. He could kill her easy, snap her neck. Didn’t really want to, but that never mattered in the past. Why should it matter now?

“I’m not going to kill him,” Leigh said at last, suddenly very tired. He studied Piper, contemplating her character. If he said he wanted to keep MacCready alive, what would she do? Would she try to interfere? No, probably not. Piper wasn't cruel or vain or manipulative or any of the other things that led people to meddle in relationships. If anything, she was high-minded. She might even help. Leigh decided to tell her the truth. "He's the most important thing I've found since the bombs fell. Keeping him alive is a priority for me. The priority, even." 

It made him feel sick to state his objective out loud, even though he knew damn well that this wasn't fascist america. No one was listening.  No one cared. He forced his attention back to Piper and her openly skeptical gaze. 

"Wanna keep him alive, huh? That's almost sweet. How come the objective's not your son?" Leigh winced. Part of him wanted to hurt her, to do anything to make the interrogation stop, and part was impressed by her utter fearlessness. She's a good person, he reminded himself. You're not permitted to hurt her.  

"I don't like thinking about my son," he said. It was- well- he didn't like Shaun, or at least he didn't like that Shaun was still alive, and Davi wasn't. Shaun had been his gift to her, his promise that after he wrapped up his tour of duty the two of them were going to defect back to China. It hurt to think about that imagined future, about Davi and the maple leaf tattooed on her wrist, her silent reminder to the world that she came from an occupied country.  He'd promised to get her out, and instead she'd finished her life in a frozen prison. 

"Then why go through all that with Kellogg?" Piper asked, cool as a cat. Like any really good reporter, she kept whatever she was thinking tucked up in her head, didn’t let it get between her and the story. In another life, she would have made a decent spy.

“He killed my wife,” Leigh said. “I loved her, Piper. I loved her so much. When I think about that poor kid the Institute stole from me, all I can think of is her. It’s not- not that I don’t care about Shaun. I just don’t know what I would do with him.” Teach him chinese, maybe. Leigh had played a lot of roles, but he'd never played Dad, and he wasn't sure how. 

 

“Be his dad, probably,” Piper said. Again, it was the perfect tone: more or less flat, just a little sarcastic. Leigh quite liked Piper when she wasn’t pointed at him.

“I guess,” Leigh says. “It’s not like that’s hard to fuck up. Look at Cait.”

“I don’t see you selling your kid to slavers, Blue, no matter how hard up you get.”

“It sounds stupid- but I was hoping MacCready would help with Shaun,” Leigh admitted. Oddly, this was the most mortifying thing he’d said so far. Leigh hated talking about himself like this, hated this kind of boring, honest talk, hated learning all these useless facts about himself. So what if he was equal parts delighted and horrified to learn that MacCready had a kid? What good did it do him to know that he’s scared of being a parent, scared of living without a mission, scared that MacCready seemed to be everything he’d been wanting in a partner?

“You really love him, huh?” There was something soft in Piper’s voice, and Leigh recoiled from it, horrified.

“That’s not relevant, Piper,” he snapped, and got up. “And if I see anything about any of this in that paper of yours, I’ll burn your whole paper stock and use your printer for parts.”

 

Day 21.

Leigh returned to Diamond City early in the morning, frustrated that he still hadn’t found anything that would help him crack the courser chip. His house was empty, the turrets gone, scorch marks on his floor. What the hell had happened while he was gone?

He headed to the detective agency, bumping into Ellie in the little alley outside the door.

“Oh, thank god!” she said when she saw Leigh. “They didn't take you too!”

“What's happened?”

“Oh, you don't know?” She flushed, then went pale. “The Institute- the Institute's taken MacCready.” There was a dim ringing in Leigh's ears: he took a step, staggered, and nearly fell, his knees buckling.

 

Overtime, 15 minutes.

Cait, Piper and Nick were all huddled in Piper's kitchen, their faces sleepless and tight.

“Leigh,” Nick said. “Did Ellie tell you what happened? Natalie here heard the whole thing. The courser teleported in, offered MacCready a job. Mentioned his kid. Cait here thinks that's why he went.”

“He's not gonna take up with Institute for money,” Cait broke in. “He can get that from Leigh. Those bastards must have followed him when he went to see his kid.” A tiny kick of pain, to know that MacCready had used the three weeks to go see his kid.

“But he came back?” Leigh asked. Piper and Cait glanced at each other, identical looks of pity on their faces.

“Came back yesterday, with the one of the caravans.” Nick said. Leigh could feel their eyes on him like radiation across his skin, like a blast from the noonday sun. I can’t do this, he thought. But I have to. He walked behind the divider that separated Natalie's bed from the rest of the room and counted to thirty in Chinese. Breathe in, breathe out. Never mind the disappointment, the anger, the worry. Count. Put that aside. Leigh’s head was buzzing, panic filtering into his bloodstream, making him light-headed. Thirty. Time was up. Leigh straightened his shoulders, stood up straight, clicked his heels like he was standing at inspection and walked out.

“You okay, Blue?” Piper asked. Leigh smiled at her.

“I’m going to murder every motherfucker in the Institute.”

 

2 hours.

Nick was the only one to come with Leigh to the Old North Church, on the grounds that the Railroad wasn’t exactly open to outsiders. Even to Leigh’s practiced eye, the building looked like nothing but an old bombed out shell. He let Nick lead, followed him down into the catacombs in grim silence broken only by the occasional skirmish with the odd ghoul. Leigh’s impatience was mounting. They’d lost so much time already. How long did it take to extract memories from a person? An hour, two hours, a day?

They reached a dead end and Nick started to turn the dial.

“Is the password really…?” he asked. Nick sighed.

“I told them to change it, but they don’t listen to me.” That was ominous. It was all well and good for the Railroad to decide they didn't want to listen to Nick, but if they decided to get stubborn with him he'd kill them all and pry the chip decoder from their dead fingers. He pulled his Fat Man from his back and waited for the door to slide open.

There was a firing squad on the other side. A woman, holding a minigun with inhuman ease, a man with a pistol, and a woman with the posture of a leader. Leigh could turn all of them into smears on the wall with a click on the trigger. Instead, he lowered the Fat Man and waited.

“Leigh Johnson,” said the leader. “Brotherhood of Steel knight, Minuteman general, former United States Army. What brings you here?”

“I need a way into the Institute.”

The woman on the left spoke, lifting the minigun slightly. “This look like a depot to you? We don’t do trades.”

“No, you liberate synths. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to free them all at once? To get a man on the inside? I want to kill those fuckers, you understand. I want it as much as you.” The woman in the center’s face didn’t change, but the people on her side were interested. They wanted to get into the Institute, wanted it bad. Leigh smiled and set down his Fat Man, climbed out of his suit, grabbing the Courser chip as he went. The gesture sold him: he could see the three of them watching him as he got out, twirled the chip between his fingers. The floor was his.

“I have a Courser chip, you have the encoder. Let’s talk.”

 

Day 1.

Des let Leigh take the blueprints to the Brotherhood on the the condition that Deacon be allowed to come along. Evidently, the Railroad wanted intel on the Prydwen more than than they wanted to keep Leigh under their thumb. A signal grenade got them a ride, Deacon’s nails white on the inside of the vertibird, and within twenty minutes of leaving HQ they were on the Prydwen. Another half an hour was enough to get through the bureaucratic bullshit of the line of command: Ingram and Maxson wanted the machine built almost as much as Leigh.

Danse met them at Boston Airport, looking faintly sleepy. It was near ten. Reaching the Railroad and cracking the chip had cost Leigh most of the day.

“What's so urgent, soldier?”

“I found a way into the fucking Institute,” Leigh said, already heading towards the build site. Danse was so stunned he didn't remember to object to Deacon's presence until they’d already started clearing a space.

“Who's this?”

“A friend from the Minutemen. He's going to help me with the supplies.” Danse glanced at Deacon, who frowned at him, the picture of a disgruntled farmer.

“We’ve been having so many disruptions to our supply with you folks coming through,” he said, and began to harangue Danse about the Brotherhood’s effect of civilian lives. Another day, Leigh would have found it funny; today, it was just another thing to note and file away.

They worked until the sun was coming up and it became clear that they didn’t have enough materials on site to complete the blueprints. Leigh wanted to get more materials from the hanger: Danse cleared his throat awkwardly and said that everything else on site was already earmarked for another project, and for a moment Leigh was ready to murder him and build the relay out of the pieces of his bloody power armor.

“How long will it take the Brotherhood to ship something in?” Leigh demanded.

“About a week, if we radio it into the Capital Wasteland,” Danse said, but Leigh had stopped listening at one week.

“Too long. I’ll grab supplies from my stash. Deacon, help me make a list.” They went over every inch of the blueprint, picking out things they might need, then headed off to the castle. Leigh’s head was beginning to buzz with tiredness, but he could sleep after putting the order in. It hurt to think of sleeping at all, alone in the bed when he’d hoped to be with MacCready at last, but there was nothing for it. There would almost certainly be a fight when they arrived at the Institute, and Leigh needed to be in decent shape for it.

He finished the list and started to walk, Deacon chasing after him.

“Not to say I told you so, but you could totally have built the relay with us.”

“You wouldn’t let the minutemen deliver to you.,” Leigh said, cross. “As usual, I have to do everything myself.” MacCready would have laughed if he’d been there, laughed and needled Leigh about it. The thought made Leigh’s throat ache. “My fucking partner is probably dying in the Institute, and they can’t spare some parts from their low-rent power armor.”

“Your partner?”

“MacCready. Here’s hoping you get to meet him.” Leigh hadn’t meant mention that MacCready had been kidnapped, but he was tired and the image of MacCready kept buzzing through his head, a fine filter over everything saw.

“I’ve heard of him. He's got quite the reputation after what happened at Quincy.”

“Quincy?”

“Some general you are,” Deacon said. Leigh felt a sharp drop in his stomach.

“You mean, the massacre? MacCready was there for that?” Even as he said it, he knew that MacCready had done something awful; it had been plain to see in his face when he talked about the Gunners, in the gleeful way he’d picked over their corpses. Oddly, the thought came with a rush of fondness: poor and desperate as he was, MacCready had quit, had decided to risk death or starvation rather than do something he thought was wrong. It was so stupid it was almost sweet.

“Took out the sentries himself,” Deacon said, snapping Leigh out of his fugue. He missed MacCready so much it was a physical thing, an ache spearing him through the center. “That's not the notable part, though. The notable part is that he quit. Not a lot of people make it out of the Gunners. We tried to recruit him, but he told us to piss up a tree.”

“I'm not surprised. MacCready is a family and friends kind of guy, not a greater good kind of guy.”

“What kind of guy are you?”

“I'm a patriot of the good ole US of A,” Leigh said on reflex, and grinned, pleased that his old defenses were kicking in again. “Gotta keep your eye on the prize. Besides, it’s not like I have much in the way of family left, though I have to say that I'm not mighty pleased with what striving for the greater good has done to the world.” He gestured to the blasted wasteland around them. “Every bomb that fell, some asshole pushed the button because he thought that ideas matter more than people, that it doesn't matter if you murder a hundred people, because they're evil, and that makes it okay.”

“Wow, Leigh, you sure know what to say to get a girl's heart fluttering. You sweet talker, you.” Leigh shrugged.

“What kind of guy are you, Deacon?”

“I'm an agent of good, of course,” Deacon said, striking a pose. “In the name of the moon, I will punish you.”

“Of course,” said Leigh, and smiled thinly. “Pretty Sailor Deacon.” He wondered whether Deacon considered the Brotherhood evil, whether he would consider it any kind of a loss if the Prydwen went up in flames. MacCready wouldn’t care: he’d laugh and say that they were just assholes, that they deserved it. The problem was, Leigh was starting to think that everybody was an asshole, and none of them deserved it. They reached the Castle and all thoughts of the Brotherhood vanished, the world narrowing to a single point.

Here is the problem. Find the solution.

 

Day 2.

Console, 40% complete.

 

Day 3.

Console, 60% complete.

Radar Dish, 15% complete.

Day 4. Deacon left. Leigh worked. Maxson had come to help with the construction, bringing a wave of giggly initiates with him who couldn’t be trusted with anything more complicated than nailing down a sheet of metal. After Leigh snapped at one of them Danse took charge, leaving Leigh to work on the fiddly electronics of the radar dish in peace.

He hadn’t slept more than four hours the day before; every noise, every footstep, jerked him awake. He was exhausted, his arms and legs aching, tiredness pressing in against his forehead, but he couldn’t sleep. Somewhere, MacCready was waiting for him.

Around nine, he finished the radar dish. Only the beam emitter left. He headed over to the supplies pile, only to find that someone had taken all the aluminium and circuit boards.

“We finished it while you were working on the dish,” Danse said gently.

“Who did the electronics?” Leigh demanded. Danse was a good engineer, not a great one, not a specialist like Leigh.  

“Proctor Ingram put them together herself.”

“So, it’s ready then,” Leigh said, heart leaping. “We just have to hook up the generators.”

“Not tonight, Leigh,” Danse said gently. “Whatever you have to deal with in the Institute, you’ll deal with it better after you’ve had some sleep.”

“MacCready is in the Institute right now, Danse!” Words failed Leigh. He scrambled, looking for something, anything that would make Danse understand, make Danse help him. “I know you don’t like him, but god, he doesn’t deserve to die at the hands of the Institute.”

“No one does, Leigh. We’ll get him back, and kill every one of those bastards. Tomorrow.”

“I’m fine,” Leigh said, willing his voice to come out even. “I’ve done way longer campaigns, gone days without sleeping. I can do this.”

“I know you can, but we have to check the lines, and it’s better if someone who’s not you does it.” Danse’s voice was horrible, gentle, like he thought he was being kind. Leigh forced his hands to unclench and tried to think, to find the thing he could say that would make Danse understand. What could he say? Danse didn’t understand what MacCready meant to Leigh, what he’d survived, the way he’d insisted on giving Leigh’s caps back, the way he was a better person than Leigh would ever be.

“He’s my partner, Danse. I’ve lost so many other people, my wife, my son, my whole country." Each word slipping out of Leigh’s mouth felt like defeat, like MacCready was slipping away from him by the moment. One more loss for the pile. He continued, stubbornly, knowing it was useless. “Maybe there was nothing I could do for them, but I might still be able to save MacCready.” It felt like a kick in the chest to admit that his efforts had been useless, but it was probably true. Leigh had been a good spy, one of the best, but he’d only been one man up against the entire insanity of that war. It felt stupid, now, looking back, that he’d ever believed he could change a thing, but he had. He’d believed with everything he had. One more illusion to throw on the funeral pyre of the old world.

“Beer?” said Danse, and steered the two of them to one of the benches around the amphitheatre. Leigh took the drink and went, defeated. His throat ached with thirst. He took a drink, watching Danse suspiciously, but Danse wasn’t looking at him, not really.

“My best friend died a few years back,” Danse said, staring at the ground in front of him with a fixed expression. “I had a stupid crush on him. You know how it is. I was young and awkward, and I didn’t have the guts to say anything.”

“You declaring your love for me, Danse?”

“You wish. I don’t get you and MacCready, but that’s not my call to make. You think he’s the guy for you, I wish you luck.” Danse did look up then, sadness written big on his face. “Whatever happens, Leigh, it’s not your fault.”

“How would you fucking know?” Leigh demanded, and started to get up. Danse grabbed him by the forearm, forced him back down into the seat.

“You didn’t decide to kidnap him. You didn’t make the Institute, you didn’t make the Courser. Now stop beating yourself up. The Institute doesn’t need any help.”

“Are you done?”

“Shut up and drink your beer, Leigh.” They sat there, Danse’s hand still around Leigh’s forearm, and slowly the anger leaked out of Leigh’s body and exhaustion leaked in to take its place. He’d worked so long his back was a mess of knots, his eyes aching from hours of squinting. He had a headache. The beer Danse had brought him was cold, at least; he finished it and put the surface against his forehead, eyes closed.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“As you’re under extreme duress, soldier, I’ll ignore it,” Danse said, his tone light, and it was a joke, Danse had made a joke.

“I thought you removed your sense of humor to make your power armor lighter.” Danse looked a little wistful.

“Cutler was the funny one.” The moonlight didn’t soften his face, exactly, but it made him younger, removed his usual mantle of authority. Leigh didn’t think he’d ever seen the man slouch before, but Danse was slouching, his weight on his arms as he stared upwards. They sat in comfortable silence, drinking and looking at the sky. Leigh’s muscles were slowly uncurling, tiredness making his body heavy and warm. Somewhere, MacCready was waiting for him. He had to believe that.

“Danse...your friend. I’m sure he knew.” Danse snorted.

“No greater love than for your fellow soldier, sure. But I would have liked to tell him in person.”

“How unprofessional of you,” Leigh said, lifting his eyebrows, and Danse flushed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said stubbornly.  Leigh punched him in the shoulder lightly, and Danse laughed. Afterwards, Leigh didn’t remember falling asleep, only waking up in the base, an ugly blanket tossed over him, a bottle of water at his bedside.

 

Day 5.

Everyone came to watch Leigh teleport out: Piper, with her notebook, Cait with a bottle of whiskey, Preston, on a rare break from his Minuteman duties, Danse and Nick, casting suspicious glances at each other. Cait gave him a shot for good luck, and then it was time to stand on the platform, adrenaline thrumming through his veins.

“Ad victoriam,” Danse said softly. Victory or death, Leigh thought. The platform above him was thrumming with electricity, filling the air with a sour ozone smell. Proctor Ingram flipped the switch, and the last thing Leigh heard was the strains of classical music, the signal fading abruptly as the world turned to white.

Zero.

MacCready was a single spot of yellow and green in all the Institute white, his coat tucked in, his face uncharacteristically clean, his eyes wide as he stared up at Leigh.

“Hey,” he said, his voice breaking. Leigh inhaled slowly, trying to calm himself, and it felt like coming up for air, like he'd emerged at last after too long underwater, like the first breath in 26 days. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Shout-out to Limiculous for beta-reading this for me!  
> -This chapter takes place at the same time as chapter 9 of Shot Through the Head, and should be read concurrently with that.  
> -It is my personal headcanon that MacCready participated in the Qunicy massacre and that's what made him leave. The timeline fits! (Everyone I most love writing about is a total asshole. Oh well.)


	4. doublethink

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter of Safe Distance takes place concurrently with Chapter 10 of Shot Through the Head. It may be helpful to read that first.

The next morning,  Leigh’s memory of that first conversation with MacCready came to him in fragments. He remembered the Institute, the white walls and bright lights that stung his eyes. He didn’t remember Shaun. He knew, objectively, that he’d spoken with Shaun after teleporting into the Institute, that they’d had some kind of talk, but the words of that talk were gone. Leigh had always been good at putting unpleasant things out of his mind. Too good, maybe. His memory was a redacted document.

The conversation with MacCready was a empty space in his head, but he remembered his own exhaustion and rage, his fear. He’d been so afraid, unable to really believe that MacCready was still alive.

“So, you’re working for the Institute, huh?” Leigh had said. He’d been so tired, totally unable to deal with the wary looks MacCready was giving him, as though he hadn’t been through hell and a half. “How long?”

The footage cut out after that point. MacCready had told him at some point that they were being watched, and they’d said some words to each other. Leigh didn’t really care. The hug, though. He remembered that. MacCready had been so wary, frightened as a deer in the forest, but he’d let Leigh come to him anyway. Let Leigh get on his knees and hug him, dizzy with intense temporary relief.

It hadn’t lasted. It never did. But for a few minutes with his knees on the floor and his face buried in the side of MacCready’s neck, all the bullshit Leigh had been through had been worth it.

 ***

A persistent tapping woke Leigh the next morning. He staggered groggily into consciousness, feeling like a suit of power armor with rusty joints. Shaun. Shaun was coming, and Leigh needed to sell… something to him. Shaun didn’t know what he wanted from Leigh, which made it hard for Leigh to give it to him.

“What happened to your forehead?” MacCready asked. The words hardly mattered; MacCready could have said anything and Leigh would still have been half-dizzy with the delight of hearing his voice again. He was alive. Leigh was alive. The rest didn’t matter. Leigh smiled at him, then remembered that he had been asked a question, and hastily responded.

“It turns out that Doc Crocker is a murderer, but so am I, and uh, I’ve had more practice.”

“Heh, amateur,” MacCready said, and paused. Uncertainty flashed across his face.

Objective: Get MacCready to trust him again.

Shaun and the courser appeared at the door and Leigh was forced to follow them out. Shaun began to talk about the Institute, about his own work on biology, although he must have damn well known that Leigh couldn’t follow any of it. Well, two could play at that game. As soon as the conversation turned to him, Leigh launched into an explanation of his senior thesis in engineering, complete with as much jargon as he could stuff in. Shaun didn’t seem to mind- in fact, he seemed to be following along. Ugh. Of course someone who ran a place like this would enjoy listening to boring technical explanations. Leigh switched tracks.

““So, when do I get to look at the teleporter?”

“Well, that’s very pivotal. The scientists working on it would prefer to keep their work private until you’ve proven that you’re truly loyal to the Institute.” Truly loyal to the Institute, Leigh thought, and tucked that away to laugh at later. This was no time to be thinking his own thoughts; he needed to be Leigh Johnson, a talented nuclear engineer, the sort of person who valued knowledge over courage and comfort over morals. It wasn’t hard. After the month he’d had, it would be nice to be comfortable.

“So, what do you want me to do? Not to be pushy, but that’s the first real advance in technology I’ve seen in the post-war Commonwealth and I’m really interested. Will you at least tell me what theory it was? Quantum foam? Amplitudehedrons?”

“Amplitudehedrons,” said Shaun, looking amused. “I didn’t realize you’d be familiar.”

“I’m not terribly, but I had a friend in the field in grad school and we would talk sometimes. Regardless, what would you like me to do?” He glanced at MacCready to see whether MacCready had caught on to the con yet. MacCready looked resigned.

“I was thinking you could help the energy department. They’re interested in your new technique to make fusion cores last longer.”

“You want me to do science?” Leigh said. He was only a little surprised, but it wouldn’t hurt to play to Shaun’s image of his as a fellow scientist. “That’s new. My pleasure.”

“Were you expecting me to use best nuclear physicist in the Commonwealth as an errand boy?” Shaun asked. Maybe Leigh had overdone it slightly.

“Well, you sent me out into the Commonwealth to murder things for six months in search of my son, so, yes?” Shaun had explained that slightly the day before, and all of his excuses had been stupid. If they wanted him, they should have come to get him. The sort of man he was pretending to be would resent that. “At this point I’m probably better at violence than physics,” he finished, folding his arms.

“Well, we’ll just have to get you back up to speed.” Shaun said, expression as placid as if he hadn’t heard the first part of the sentence. “Let’s take you to your lab.” There was a slight emphasis on you. MacCready looked annoyed. Leigh didn’t want to step away from him, not even a little, but he needed to be excited about his lab. He permitted himself one last dopey smile at MacCready before following Shaun.

They took the long way to the lab, Shaun trying to show off without being obvious. He clearly wanted Leigh to like the Institute, but he was so incompetent he couldn't string together three words without making Leigh want to punch him. Please, Leigh begged silently, give me a line I can use. Oblivious to Leigh's prayers, Shaun continued to recite boring lines about the importance of technological advancement and the Institute's commitment to science. He was like a bad advertisement, a page full of fine print when the editor had asked for a bright picture.

"The director of the SRB wanted to speak to you," Shaun said, stopping in front of a heavily guarded set of doors. One of the coursers peeled off from the door and followed them in. Leigh stifled the urge to smile; the acronym, the uniforms, the coursers- the whole thing was llike a bunch of children playing at being soldiers. Leigh could have cleared the Institute in two hours with his old squad. 

"By all means," he said, and followed Shaun in. The SRB was predictably small; Leigh revised his estimate. He could have killed everyone in the place by himself, but now wasn't the time to think like that. There were people looking at him. 

 

“You saw the SRB yesterday, but you didn’t seem in the proper frame of mind to appreciate it,” Shaun said mildly.

“I hadn’t slept more than ten hours in five days, so I hope you'll forgive me,” Leigh said, glancing around. He didn’t remember a damn thing. Most of the previous day had completely failed to save to disk. There were penalties for staying awake so long.

“We were watching you on the birds,” Shaun said with a little smile, and walked over to a monitor, where he began to toggle through various cameras. Camera 1- the Brotherhood of Steel. Camera 2- Diamond City. Camera 3- Goodneighbor. The images went by in a flash, some of them in places he recognized, some completely foreign. He thought he caught a flash of McCready's son, but it might have been any child.

“Wow,” he said, when he realized Shaun was watching him. “That’s really impressive. How do you control the birds? God, I wish, I wish we’d had this before the war. Think of all the intel we could have gathered... how did you integrate the cameras and the technology?”

“That’s not really what we do here,” a scientist said. Leigh had met him the day before, but he couldn’t remember his fucking name. Damn, he had really been exhausted.

“Oh, sorry,” Leigh said, and forced himself to look away from the cameras and shake the man’s hand. “Leigh Johnson. Sorry for barging in like this.”

“We don’t get unexpected visitors that often,” the man agreed. “You’ll have to tell me how you cracked my chip sometime.”

“That wasn’t really me,” Leigh said unthinkingly, and remembered who he was speaking to. “I’m sure you already know that. The Railroad, they have this machine. Lucky for me that you guys haven’t wiped them out yet.” The coursers had gone very still when Leigh mentioned the railroad.

“Do you know where they are?”

“They’re in the Old North Church,” Leigh said, wondering where this was going. They knew that- they had to know. The damn church was at the end of something called the Freedom trail, and the agents handed out directions to it like candy. Shaun looked at the other man, who smiled.

“We hope you don’t have any plans to work with them further,” he said.

“Dr. Ayo has spent a lot of time trying to minimize the damage these pests do,” Shaun said. Too late, Leigh remembered who the man was. The head of the SRB. MacCready’s boss.

“Why would I? I only talked to them because I wanted to get to you.“

“To get to your mercenary,” Ayo said, and typed in a command. MacCready appeared on the screen. He and X6 were fighting a Brotherhood patrol; Leigh watched, mesmerized, as X6 ran up the side of a building and launched himself into a helicopter.

“That’s... how does he do that?” Leigh said. Ayo smiled, a tight, mean little smile.

"Our coursers are top of the line technology," he said. MacCready appeared on screen. He fired two shots into a distant pair of raiders and scurried onto the vertibird. The three of them watched as he and X6 played chicken with a missile launcher. Leigh's pulse was thudding in his throat; was he going to watch MacCready die on screen? The raider raised the missile launcher. The Institute bird retreated to a distance. MacCready fired. 

"Your mercenary isn't too shabby," Ayo said grudgingly. Leigh could barely tear his eyes away. He watched as X6 and MacCready dispatched the rest of the raiders, perfect shot after perfect shot. 

“You seem attached,” Shaun commented.

“To my boyfriend?” Leigh asked. Shaun's face sagged, just a little, when Leigh called him that. The man didn't like him. Leigh forced his gaze away from the screen and back to his companions; MacCready could take care of himself in the Commonwealth, but Leigh needed to protect him here. 

 “He seems like a strange choice of companion,” Ayo said. How could Leigh play this? He couldn’t lie about how much he cared about MacCready- if he made MacCready seem disposable these people would discard him instantaneously. He tried to think of a way to make the awful, tender feeling in his stomach palatable and failed. 

"If you were on the surface, it would make perfect sense," he managed. "MacCready is resourceful. He's funny. He won't shoot you over caps, and he listens when you give him directions. Panic was beginning to wear at the edge of his calm; he needed to convince these people to keep him and MacCready alive. “He knows how to throw a grenade, how to cook, and the location of every doctor in the Wasteland. But that's all details. I love him. Everything else is just excuses."

 An explosion on screen caught his eye; he glanced back so he wouldn’t have to see the carefully blank looks on Ayo and Shaun’s faces. On screen, MacCready drilled a raider through the head despite the wildly pitching vertibird. Leigh smiled ruefully. “The best sniper in the Commonwealth,” he said. “One in a thousand. I like exceptional things.”

“You’re in a good place for it,” Shaun said. Leigh didn’t need to fake his smile. Shaun was still tepidly trying to convince him to join his stupid little club, even if he didn’t approve of MacCready.

“That was obvious from the moment I stepped into the elevator,” Leigh said.

“Let me show you the rest,” Shaun suggested, and they stepped away from the monitors.

 ***

The Grand tour lasted a few more hours, and then they stopped for lunch. The food in the Institute came out of tubes and tasted like year old rations, but it was hardly the worst thing Leigh had choked down since entering the wasteland. Leigh chugged down a gulp of water and wondered if Shaun knew that Leigh had eaten human meat. Probably not. He’d done it to get Strong to go along with his plan, and they’d been indoors, holed up in a nasty sewer system. No one from the Institute would go there without a reason; even the coursers that Leigh had overheard talking were snobby about the “filth of the surface.” Imitating their overlords, poor bastards, as if it would get them anything.

Next to him, Shaun was patiently listening to a bubbly girl from Facilities talk at him about energy transfer.  Better for Leigh; that way he didn’t have to hear Shaun’s voice. His son had an opaque, calm way of speaking that made him sound like a cheap knock-off of Leigh’s wife. Davi had been a great speaker, with a knack for sharp phrases and vicious verbal jabs. Shaun sounded like an infomercial or a voiceover at the beginning of a mediocre movie.

In fact, Leigh thought, jabbing at his tube of paste, Shaun barely talked at all. He hadn’t answered any of Leigh's questions about himself, or about Leigh, or MacCready, or Davi, but when it came to the Institute he was a fount of information. All the things in the world to be fixated on, and he'd decided to devote himself to a place- not even an ideal, or a person, but a place- and this place, this slaughterhouse dressed in a coat of white paint. It made Leigh sick. Everything for the cause, and never mind the collateral.

“You seem to be tired,” Shaun remarked as they finished their lunch.

“It’s been a tiring week,” Leigh replied. Twenty-two days, his mind provided.

“Would you like to head back to your room?” Shaun asked.

“If you don’t mind waiting on the rest of the tour.”

“I don’t.” They rose and walked in silence towards Leigh’s room, people openly staring at Leigh as he walked by. There probably weren’t too many visitors in the Institute.

“You’re still wary of us,” Shaun remarked.

“From a practical perspective, I find it difficult to believe that you’re not planning violence against me, considering the hostility I’ve encountered from previous agents of this Institute. It’s… disconcerting to go from the violence of the Commonwealth to this.” Legh gestured at the white walls, the synths hard at work scrubbing the floor. “It feels too good to be true.”

“If we were planning violence against you, we would have done so already. There’s no value in fooling you like this.” What an idiot. Leigh was probably the best connected person in the Commonwealth. It would be immensely valuable to have him as a double-agent, or to replace him with a synth. But of course, Shaun didn’t care about the Commonwealth or understand its value.

“What was the value in kidnapping MacCready, or in making me trek across the Commonwealth? You knew my background. I’m probably one of the best remaining nuclear scientists in the world, and you left me to fight raiders. Why?”

“There are more factors at work than you understand.”

“Like what?”

“You were with the Brotherhood of Steel.”

“So, why not get me before I joined? You knew when I came out. Your spy birds are everywhere, and I wasn’t exactly quiet. I could have been here months ago.”

“We wanted you to prove yourself.”

“But none of the things I’ve been doing have been things the Institute values. I’ve been farming melons and shooting raiders, not anything scientifically impressive.”

“You built your own signal array.”

“You could have asked me to do that, and saved me a week of thinking my boyfriend was dead.”

“Enough,” Shaun said.

“Enough,” Leigh echoed. “From one dictatorship to another. I came in here with a nuke strapped to my armor, ready to collapse the whole structure, and you won’t even explain the decision making process that led to that totally unnecessary stand-off.”

“That is an unfortunate level of savagery,” Shaun said. Leigh felt a bite of killing rage rising in his chest; he wanted to reach out and strangle this stranger to death with his bare hands. His son. The life he’d wanted, the wife he’d loved, all of it was gone; and this fucking man, this bastard, was his consolation prize. Leigh was going to enjoy destroying his empire, but not now. Not yet. First, Leigh was going to fool him, to make him think he was safe and then, once Shaun had handed over the keys to his beloved Institute, Leigh was going to set the place up in flames.

“I’m a practical man, Shaun,” Leigh said, letting some of his sincere anger show through. “I’d rather live somewhere where the taps run water that isn’t irradiated. I’d like to be an engineer and work towards something meaningful. But if the cost of living down here is that I’m treated like a synth, it’s too high. If I’m going to stay here, I have to be treated with a civilized level of respect.” Shaun stared at him. There was a part of Leigh that thought he’d pushed too far, that they were going to die. There was another part that didn’t care, that thought MacCready might be dead, that the thing with his face might be a synth. They stared at each other a long time, until at last Shaun spoke.

“My apologies,” he said. “You’re a very resourceful man, and we’ve long been impressed by your ingenuity at surviving in the Wasteland, but we should have called you in sooner.”

“Thank you,” Leigh said, letting irritation show in his voice. Shaun inclined his head and began to walk away, shuffling at an old man’s pace. Leigh walked after him. They walked in silence a few steps, Leigh counting off time in his head. When he thought it had been long enough, he spoke.

“I suppose I’d better make up for lost time. Do you have any textbooks?”

 ***

Leigh was getting caught up on his biology when MacCready strolled into the room grinning and flushed with violence, as handsome as he’d been in all Leigh’s hungry fantasies of the past three weeks. Leigh wanted to kiss him, to tell him how sorry he was that he’d gotten involved with this mess, but he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about that. He was supposed to be thinking about the shiny new Institute and all the toys in it, not about his grubby wasteland boyfriend with his sharp smile.

“Long day?” MacCready asked, raising an eyebrow. Leigh had the sudden urge to kiss his forehead, but there was work to do, people to fool. They’d kiss later.

“They have stuff here we didn't even have before the war,” Leigh said, and tried to explain to MacCready how electrons worked. MacCready wasn’t really listening. Finally, his patience gave out, and he interrupted Leigh mid-explanation.

““Hey, Leigh? I really don’t care.”

“Sorry,” said Leigh, faking embarassment. They talked a while about the mission. MacCready was afraid that Shaun was going to arrange his death; Leigh tried to reassure him without saying anything that would make Shaun suspicious. The first few days would set the tone of this con; he needed to make them good. MacCready was practical above all else; he’d understand once Leigh got a chance to explain. He had to.

“What is it?” MacCready asked.

“I was thinking about how much I want to kiss you,” Leigh said lightly. MacCready scowled, his face appealingly flushed, and tilted his chin up.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Leigh leaned in, and for a moment everything fell away- the Institute, Shaun, the Brotherhood of Steel, China, Leigh- and there was only the brush of MacCready’s lips against his own, the feel of his skin. Leigh felt a stab of panic, like freefall, like the moment when an explosion knocked the world off its axis. MacCready was staring at him, a little puzzled line between his eyebrows, and Leigh- Leigh was in love.

 ***

It was a damn inconvenient time to be achingly, stupidly in love. MacCready was gone every morning to go shoot things, and Leigh couldn’t even loaf around and watch him on the cameras. Shaun insisted on taking him room by room through the Institute and introducing him to every last damn scientist. It was useful. But part of Leigh ached to be with MacCready, against all reason and sense, and though he pushed it down, it stubbornly resurfaced.

By the third day, Leigh had the sense that the Institute was kind of like a fucked up university. Shaun’s tours felt like being shown around the campus during orientation, and meeting the departments heads was like getting to know the professors. Luckily, Leigh’s background in engineering was broad enough to make him relevant to the engineering department, but he wasn’t going to  to rest on his laurels. If he ran out of ability to impress Shaun and the department heads, he and MacCready would be staring down a courser’s gun barrel by the end of the day. Knowledge was power here, and Leigh had no intention of being left powerless.

On the fourth day, just as he was beginning to settle in, they took him back to the SRB.

“One of our synths has experienced a malfunction,” Dr. Ayo said. “It’s rare that we have an opportunity to use the chair. You’ve very lucky.” They took him down into SRB, and sat him in a neat little chair. The audeince was mostly scientists, but their was a row of coursers at tthe back of the room, and more syntsh above at the windows.

The main attraction was a young man, gagged and bound to the machine at the back of the room, his hands straining convulsively against his restraints. His cheeks were wet with tears. Leigh glanced away. He’d seen plenty of executions during the war, Chinese soldiers lined up against the wall and shot, but it never stopped being unpleasant. The trick was to make it work for you; to be the person you were pretending to be, to take your anger and store it, save it for when it would be useful.

Leigh got up and went over to where Ayo was tapping away at a screen, flanked by his assistant. He made eye contact with the assistant and tried a small smile. She looked a little alarmed; Leigh was still coming on too strong. He still hadn't fully adjusted to the Institute norms. Ten feet away, the synth was jerking back and forth in his restraints.

No. Leigh couldn’t think about that.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“We’re going to wipe it,” the assistant said, looking relieved. “It’s had a malfunction of some sort, and now it believes it’s a human being. See, we’ve pioneered the deletion of select sections of memory by priming the neurons with memosynthetic fluid and then stimulating them manually.” The last, most sacred boundary of the human being, and they were inviting people to come and watch as it was violated, like raiders crowding around a new hostage. Leigh shoved the thought from his head. What was wrong with him?

“You don’t do this to humans, do you?” he asked, and felt like slapping himself.

“Oh, no, of course not,” the assistant said, looking shocked. “That would be wrong.”

“Good, good,” Leigh said. He let himself smile genuinely at the assistant, not needing to fake his relief. “I’m sorry, but I’ve met so many terrible people on the surface, and it’s made me suspicious. It's good to be back among civilized people.”

“Welcome back,” the assistant said, a blush spreading across her face. Maybe Leigh hadn’t completely lost his touch. He listened to her talk until Ayo called for everyone to sit back down, then sat down.

“Everyone, please welcome Leigh Johnson, the father of our very own Director Johnson. And now, a demonstration of our recent advances. Alana, bring up the screens.”

The synth in the chair jerked back and forth, its back arching, muffled screams filtering through the gag in its throat. Leigh stared at the screen above and focused on keeping his body relaxed, his fists unclenched, and a pleasant expression on his face. There was the sound of a saw grating against bone, and the room filled with the unpleasant smell of burned hair and antiseptic. Something was happening on the screen.

“We’re in,” the perky assistant announced. A diagram flashed across the screen; Leigh squinted at it, trying desperately to focus on the science. They’d designed these people to be programmable. God. At least they hadn’t had this before the war; Leigh would have gone under the knife for sure. Hell, he would have asked for it. He’d wanted to be programmable. The thought made him shudder. The chair didn’t work perfectly, though, did it? A reset implied that it could be done multiple times.

Leigh’s brain, which had frozen up with terror, began to work again. The thing happening in front of him wasn’t for his benefit, even if it had the convenient side effect of testing his loyalties. This was for the synths. The SRB wasn’t a military; it was a guard post, and this was their way of frightening the prisoners. Don’t fuck up, or it’ll be you in this chair with a drill in your brain. It was a show of power, which implied resistance.

Objective: discover who the actual Railroad members within the Institute are.

The windows above the little room were crammed with synths and scientists, all of them watching the procedure politely. Plenty of eyes on him, a huge audience to fool. It was easier to trick twenty people than one, because twenty people paid less attention. Leigh smiled. He looked at the screens and listened. As expected, there was a question and answer section. He made sure his hand was the first in the air.

After that first hurdle, the rest fell into place like soldiers in formation. Leigh had seen the secret heart of the Institute’s obsession, the source of all its power and fear: the synths. Synths made the food and clothes, synths tended to the scientist’s children and swept the paths they walked on. They whispered among themselves in clusters and passed information in the stairwells, clustering in the blind spots of the cameras. Several times Leigh felt the creeping sensation that he was being watched and turned his head only to meet a blank stare.

That was the key to survival at the Institute: plausible deniability. No one would admit to watching, or to being watched. No one could. To admit to feeling the gaze of a synth was tantamount to admitting the existence of a mind behind the gaze, and that was a crime the Institute could not tolerate. The synths weren’t people because they couldn’t be. It was impossible. And yet the possibility was like gravity, inescapable.  Everything moved in its orbit. The coursers, the chair, the scientists. They claimed to be in power, but their every word, their every motion, was designed to avoid a single question.

***

Leigh adjusted his tie in the mirror and smiled. It had taken less than two weeks to enchant most of the people in his lab; in the land of liars and thieves, Leigh was king. Shaun had designed a kind of spy’s wonderland where everyone was desperate to incriminate everyone else; it was almost like he’d been waiting for Leigh. It would have been perfect, if not for MacCready.

He reached the lab and greeted Angela and Maria. Maria waved cheerfully from her post, and Angela waved a hand at him from behind her pile of books. He’d take it. Angela was generally hip-deep in paperwork, and disliked everyone who wasn’t. Well, she was allowed. It was people like Angela who made the Institute run.

“More work on the energy transfer?” Maria asked.

“Yep,” Leigh said. He had a vague idea that if the plans he was suggesting were carried through the reactor would explode, but he wasn’t sure. He needed to check them more. It would be such a shame if he turned in bad plans; everyone in the office would make fun of him. He worked in careful silence for a few hours, occasionally stopping to greet one of his colleagues as they filtered in and out of the lab.

They all paused for lunch at Angela’s suggestion. Synths brought them soup and a kind of hard bread, and they ate while watching MacCready’s exploits on the big screen. MacCready and X6 were hunting down a rogue synth. As Leigh watched, X6 vaulted up the side of a building and lifted a supermutant into the air, then tossed it down over the ramparts. MacCready shot it as it fell.

“I honestly don’t know how he shoots that well without enhancements,” Dr. Dos Santos said.

“It’s a mystery,” Leigh said. “I’m not complaining, though. Saved my life more than once.” He was pretty sure his lab-mates thought he was a bit dumb for continuing to date MacCready now that he was no longer useful, but it didn’t matter. Leigh wasn’t planning to continue in the Institute long enough for it to be an issue.

On screen, MacCready grinned and slapped X6 on the shoulder. They’d almost reached the synth they were tracking. Behind MacCready’s back, X6 was looking at him with what passed for fondness on a courser. Leigh felt a sudden stab of jealousy. That was his spot, and that thing had no business out in the field with MacCready.

No. That wasn’t right. He couldn’t be jealous of X6, because X6 wasn’t a person, and Leigh had the better life, here in the lab, and if sometimes he felt otherwise that was a thought for late at night, when the lights were off.

Lunch ended. Leigh felt a vague sense of relief. He didn’t like looking at MacCready on the screen, he thought vaguely. Was that right? It didn’t seem like a thought he should have. Why should it bother him for his coworkers to sit in their comfortable chairs and make jokes while MacCready murdered and bled out in the wasteland? Leigh put the thought from his head. Maria wanted someone to help her brainstorm, and Leigh was happy to work with her instead of working alone.

The day finished. Leigh went home, humming to himself. MacCready had brought home some steaks, so Leigh would make him dinner. He cooked the steaks nervously, and managed not to burn them. He was laying them out when MacCready came through the door, grunted a hello and plopped down on the couch to watch his son play in the field for the hundredth time. Leigh felt a little stab of something unpleasant. He put it away. It wasn’t relevant. He didn’t want to make MacCready angry.

He wanted a kiss. He wanted MacCready to stop acting so fucking resentful, as if they weren’t nice and safe now, inside the only respectable establishment in the Commonwealth, inside this cage that Leigh was trying so desperately to lockpick…

“Come to dinner,” Leigh said. MacCready sighed theatrically and slouched over to the table. Leigh was vaguely aware that his feelings were a complicated snarl. He wanted to pick up MacCready and kiss him until he forgot how to run his smart mouth. He wanted to punch him in the face. He wanted to punch Shaun. He wanted to punch himself. A month ago MacCready would have followed him into hell and played along if Leigh made nice with the devil, but Leigh had pulled a gun on him and MacCready wasn’t the sort to forget that easily.

They sat in silence around the dinner table, MacCready surly and uncooperative. I love you, Leigh thought, staring blankly at his food. I’m doing this for you. I’d take my chances if it was just me, but you’re not as a durable as I am. He sighed and massaged the bridge of his forehead. That was no way to be thinking about things.

“Did something happen at work today?” Leigh asked. MacCready gave him a disbelieving stare and then got up, stalked over to the sink and tossed the dishes in with a crash. It wasn’t like him to be secretive. Usually when MacCready was unhappy about something you could hear him bitching about it a block off.

“My probation period is over,” he said through gritted teeth. Leigh frowned and walked over to him. Probation period? Leigh didn’t talk to Shaun about MacCready very much. He was trying to avoid drawing attention to him.

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

“No,” MacCready muttered, glaring at the counter top. Don’t start mistrusting me now, Leigh pleaded internally. I need you with me.  Was his face showing his desperation? Desperation was so ugly. He tried to smile, to cover up. MacCready didn’t need to know how Leigh felt. He just needed to trust him. Leigh leaned in, smiled and thanked god that he’d seduced so many people it was almost muscle reflex.

MacCready looked up. He seemed surprised to find Leigh so close and so much bigger than him. He bit his lip and glared, a flush starting in his cheeks.

“Are you sure?” Leigh asked, slow and suggestive. He loved teasing MacCready.

“Dead sure, boss,” MacCready said, and it sounded like he wasn’t entirely against being teased. Leigh grinned.

“Too bad,” he said, drawing out the last syllable. MacCready flushed, scowled, folded his arms and unfolded them, then dragged Leigh into a bruising kiss. Leigh hadn’t -- he wasn’t -- he couldn’t think. MacCready was kissing him like they they were in a firefight, kissing with more emotion than he’d seen in weeks. MacCready was so close, so soft and so sharp, his hand clutching Leigh’s shirt collar. Leigh couldn’t breathe, and then MacCready was shoving him off, anger on his face.

“What are you---?”

“I’m just skipping to the end, Leigh,” MacCready said, and shoved himself at Leigh. Leigh caught him without meaning to, and then they were kissing again, MacCready’s hands fisted in Leigh’s shirt.

“We don’t have to,” Leigh said weakly.

“Of course we don’t have to,” MacCready said, and pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it on the ground. “But we want to, no matter how much it costs us, and we’re not going to stop now.”

Leigh wasn’t big on having sex when one of the participants was angry, but he hadn’t touched MacCready since before the showdown at the Rexford. He allowed himself to be bullied onto the bed, back against the headboard and MacCready naked on his lap. Love was making him into one of those soft-hearted idiots who were only alive because no one had stopped them yet. Still. MacCready was scratchy and bad-tempered, but he calmed down as Leigh kissed him, petted him, did his best to say without words that he wasn’t mad at MacCready, that he refused to be mad, that he loved him.

It was easy to be tender with MacCready; he was so starved for affection that it made his whole body light up when he got any. Sweetheart, Leigh thought, nuzzling the side of MacCready’s neck. One of MacCready’s hands was on Leigh’s shoulder, the fingers clutching in time to the rhythm of Leigh’s hand on MacCready’s dick. MacCready’s other hand was on Leigh. It was like being in the barracks again, shoved up against the wall and trying not to make noises someone might hear.

“Ah,” Leigh said. “Darling--” and then MacCready was kissing him hard, biting at his lip, and Leigh forgot how to speak.

 

Afterwards, MacCready rolled off him and lay down on the bed, back to Leigh, arms folded. Sulking. Leigh fumbled for an opening salvo, his mind digging for the right words, but it was impossible. MacCready’s bare back was as unwelcoming as the drab walls of the Institute. A stab of irritation: more work after a long day. Leigh got up and grabbed a drink, hoping the cold water would clear his mind, then brought a cup back to MacCready.

“Why are you being so damn sweet and shit?” MacCready demanded. The tone suggested he knew he was being a little shit. Good.

“I’ve always been like this.” Leigh said. “Why do you mind?”

“It’s weird, Leigh. You were...you can’t just walk in here and act all cuddly, like it’s going to make up for everything.”

“I’m not doing it to make up for anything,” Leigh said quietly. Was this still about the Rexford? “I’m doing it because I missed you.” MacCready rolled over in the bed to face Leigh.

“Well, stop,” he said.

“If I could just stop, I wouldn’t be here,” Leigh said quietly, and slid into bed next to MacCready. It wasn’t a safe thing to say or a safe thing for Shaun to know, but it was true.  He could live with the scientists, with his lies, with his daily complicity in the horrors of the SRB, if only he could have MacCready as his.

He put his hand tentatively on MacCready’s shoulder, and MacCready allowed it. They looked at each other a long moment, silence hanging in the air between them. What was MacCready thinking? What did he think about the Institute, about Leigh? Leigh felt a sudden stab of hatred for Shaun, for the coursers, for the cameras, for all the people preventing him from prying the truth out of MacCready’s lips. The truth was dangerous here.

“You were gonna shoot me,” MacCready muttered. Leigh hesitated, afraid to say anything that would make MacCready angry. His boyfriend didn’t look angry. He looked resigned, exhausted. What were they making him do out on the road? Leigh shrugged, resigned himself to being truthful. For some inexplicable reason, it was easier to be truthful with MacCready than with anyone else.

“I was going to shoot myself, too,” he admitted. “Almost did. But that’s not your fault, or your problem.” MacCready was tense, waiting for something. Leigh touched his face gently. He couldn’t tell MacCready what he was going through, and MacCready couldn’t tell him. But he could know- he had to know- that they were working towards the same thing. “I’m sorry,” Leigh began. I want to tell you the truth, he thought. “I know I haven’t been a very good partner to you lately. But I’ll make it up to you. Whatever you want, I will find it for you. However many raider dens you get yourself trapped in, I will get you out.” It was as truthful as he dared to be.

“I hate that you can do this,” MacCready replied. “Just look me in the eye and make me believe whatever you want.” You said no to me at the Rexford, Leigh thought affectionately. The two weeks together had taken enough of the sting from being left that Leigh could think of it affectionately. Furious, terrified MacCready, heart-sick and wounded, and still strong enough to say no. Still suspicious, even in the face of all of Leigh’s sincere affection.

Leigh wasn’t lying now.

“I’m as capable of telling the truth as anyone else, but you don’t have to believe me,” Leigh said softly. MacCready didn’t say anything at first. But long years of practicing with trust and betrayal had honed Leigh’s skill in reading faces, in reading the moment when a door opened, or clicked shut, and MacCready had decided to trust in Leigh in a little longer. The words didn’t matter. Leigh could read it, could feel it in the weight of MacCready’s head on his shoulder.

He lay awake long after MacCready had lapsed into exhausted sleep, his body cuddled up against Leigh’s. In the all encompassing darkness, it felt as if the whole world had been erased, leaving Leigh and MacCready the last two people in the world. It would be easy to believe in the illusion, easy to close his eyes and sleep, but he couldn’t. MacCready’s soft, regular breaths were like the ticking of a clock, reminding him that time was running out.

Above, the Brotherhood would be waiting for his report, consolidating, making plans for an attack. The Railroad would be doing the same. Preston would be worried, Cait would be angry. Piper would be on the lookout for news. She and Nick would probably spend time looking for clues, traces of Leigh, reports of activity from the Institute, but they wouldn’t find anything. Leigh Johnson, Institute scientist, wasn’t the sort to try and sneak a message out of the Institute. He didn’t miss his friends. He had better, more educated friends down in the Institute, and he was looking forward to working with them the next day. Leigh felt a slimy bolt of revulsion and shook it off.  

It was hard to think when his head was tangled this way, his feelings bound in tight little knots or stretched like guitar strings. It had been easier when he’d only had to hold on and wait for instructions, when he’d had the comfort of knowing that back in China mission control was deciding when to pull the trigger. First, he thought, you have to get a gun.

Jin Li lay awake long into the night, pushing and pulling at the pieces given to him until at last the dim stirrings of a plan appeared to him. Through long habit, he plotted in Chinese, the thoughts coming to him in the shape of his native language. It had become the language of secrets to him, the language of his dead family, of his dead country. Hearing the old ghoul speak so freely in it had awakened an old hunger in him, made him desperate to hear more. Perhaps he could teach MacCready. The thought made him smile.

Jin Li fell asleep with unspoken words in his mouth, and in the morning Leigh Johnson woke up and went to work, and if he was a little tired, no one knew why.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Happy Halloween! This year, Leigh is going as himself.


	5. unfortunate anachronism

Washington DC. 2061

 

The carpet in the hallway was green and pink. For some reason, Li had expected it to be red. He stood in the hallway of his family’s one-time Washington DC home and stared, taking in the warmly colored wallpaper, the wooden floor, the shoes neatly put away at the entryway. Someone- his mother!- had hung pictures of the family in the entryway, making a little timeline. Here: Li and his sister as toddlers, perfectly identical except for their outfits. Li and Meili, now slightly larger, swimming at the beach. Li and Meili posing with the rest of their family at a birthday party, the adults grinning drunkenly into the camera.

This was his family. Strange, after so many years, to remember that he had once been part of a matched set, and yet not strange at all. This was the first place he’d ever belonged, the last time in his life when he hadn’t been lying at all about who he was. It was home.

He made his way through the hallway slowly, pausing occasionally to look the pictures. Everything was so colorful! Li had forgotten how dreary and dull the apocalypse was, as if the bombs had blasted every color but brown out of the world. People like MacCready grew up in dimly-lit caves, completely unaware of the bright world of their ancestors. Leigh’s world, now preserved only in recordings and memories.

A voice came from the living room: a man speaking in Chinese. Dad, Li thought, his heart pounding. But no matter how hard he strained his ears or how close he crept to the living room door, he couldn’t make out the words. His father was not a loud man. Disappointed, Li headed back into the house, his little feet shuffling along the floor. It was strange being ten again; he was used to being double this size. He ducked into the kitchen, idly wondering if he’d be able to reach something on the counters, and froze.

Li’s mother was at the counter, a knife held expertly in one hand. The elegant sundress she was wearing emphasized her slim figure, but it also revealed the network of shrapnel scars along her forearms.  She’d been a decorated soldier before she married his father. Leigh had never been able to see her beauty as a child, though people had often remarked on it. To him, she’d just been mom. Now, looking at this stranger, he was briefly able to see it, and then she turned to look at him and all his objectivity vanished in the wind.

“Hey, kid,” she said. Li’s mouth went dry. He fumbled for words.

“Mom,” he croaked out. “What are you making?”

“Practicing your English?” she said in Chinese. “I’m slicing some mango for your sister to eat. You can have some too.” Mango had been Meili’s favorite fruit. Leigh tried in vain to get out of eating it, but his mother was insistent. The mango was sticky and delicious, and it made Leigh resentful that he’d never taste another mango again.

“You kids,” his mother said.

“Sorry,” Li mumbled. This time, he remembered to speak in Chinese..

“When I was your age, I would have been grateful for a mango,” she said, but not unkindly. The sound of her voice reminded him that no one had spoken to him in his native language since the ghoul on the boat and he realized that he’d missed it terribly. It was so sweet to sit and be affectionately scolded that he lingered in the kitchen for what felt like hours before being chased out.  

His sister and father were still in the living room. Li suspected that time didn’t really pass in this memory, not unless he was present. Still, he caught himself shutting the door behind him when he left the house, as if the figments inside could somehow feel Li’s memory of sticky, humid, summer heat. Sweat trickled down his face as he made his way to the living room window. This time, he could make out what his father was saying.

“...the Americans are looking for any excuse to make trouble, Meili. Don’t give them an excuse. Now, what’s this I hear about you getting into a fight at school?”

“I didn’t get into a fight,” Meili said. “John called Sasha a rude word, so he got in trouble. I don’t know why he blames me.”

“Really? He punched you in the nose for no reason?”

“I didn’t do anything to him,” Meili said defiantly. “I couldn’t find my lunchbox, so I asked Miss Bolter to help me look. It’s not my fault he was being loud.”

“And how did you lose your lunchbox? You’re usually so responsible.” Li didn’t need to see his sister to know the expression that was on her face; the bland, stubborn expression of someone determined to sit quietly rather than incriminate herself. All the intimate knowledge of his sister’s mannerisms had returned to him as soon as he heard her voice, as if a sleeping limb had been abruptly returned to life.

“Cord pulled my hair,” Meili said. “When we were setting our lunchboxes down.” This was true, but it had nothing to do with why Meili had been looking for her lunchbox in that particular spot. She and Li had set John up; Li had lured him and Sasha into an area behind the school, then left them there together, knowing that John would pick on her, and Meili had called the teacher over to a spot just around the corner, knowing she would overhear the abuse. It had been one of their better schemes. From the sound of his voice, Li’s father had a pretty good idea of what had happened.

“Hmmm,” Zhang said. “How rude of Cord. I guess you won’t want him to come to your dinner party, then. Why don’t you invite Sasha instead?” Li remembered vaguely that his sister had liked Cord; this was a double punishment, replacing one of her friends with someone she didn’t know that well.

“What?” Meili demanded, and then caught herself. Their father valued keeping a cool head as the highest social grace; losing your temper never got you far with him. It was silent in the living room as their father waited for Meili to decide on her line of attack. We were only kids, Li thought, but you started training us at a young age. At least you were kind about it, unlike the trainers back home.

“Sasha doesn’t speak english that well,” Meili said at last. “I don’t know if she would feel comfortable here.”

“Well, she’s got to learn sometime,” Zhang said. “Besides, if you don’t invite her, John will make fun of her even more.”

There was a long silence. Leigh peeked cautiously into the living room and saw that his father was seated with back to the window. Meili was standing across from him, a mulish expression on her face. She caught sight of Li and shook her head, ever so slightly. Li ducked back down.

“I was only trying to help,” she muttered at last.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Li’s father said. “His parents grounded him for two weeks for punching you, by the way. So it’s not all bad.” Meili gave a dramatic sigh.

“Am I grounded?”

“Why would you be? You didn’t do anything wrong, after all. Now, go get cleaned up. You and your brother are getting new outfits to replace the one that got scuffed in the fight.” Meili’s gasp of delight was entirely unfeigned. She thanked their father enthusiastically, then ran out of the room.

Leigh slunk away from his eavesdropping post to a spot on the side of the house. It was cool and nondescript, and the twins often convened there if they were avoiding their parents. Before long Meili came charging around the side, bringing a thousand little memories with her. She’d cut her hair to match his, against their parents will, and the effect made her face the exact mirror of his. Puberty hadn’t reached her yet; it never would. The fire would take her first. Looking at her, Leigh had the twin sensations of recovering something lost and of losing something beloved. And yet, she hadn’t been beloved at all, hadn’t even been foreign; she’d just been a part of Li, or Li a part of her, joined together like an arm and a leg. He hadn’t known he could lose her until it happened.

“You heard, right?” she said. Li pulled her into a hug, his hands trembling slightly.

“Huh?” she said, her voice muffled by his shoulder. “Did Mom yell at you or something?”

“N-no,” Li said. He held her until she impatiently squirmed free.

“What is it then? Does this mean you won’t switch with me for the party?” Leigh didn’t have any memories of being caught, so he supposed he must have gone through with it successfully. He nodded.

“No, I’ll still switch,” he said. Meili grinned at him, a warm, conspiratorial expression.

“Great!” she said, pounding one little fist into the palm of her hand. “But we have to be careful. Dad always knows! How does he figure it out? Even the teacher at school trusts us.”

“Dad knows us better,” Leigh pointed out. After listening to that conversation, he thought that maybe their father had secretly been encouraging them to practice these kind of tricks while the stakes were still low, and they’d just never noticed. He wondered what his father would think of him now.

“Not that well,” Meili said. “He’s always working.”

“He’s here now,” Li said, not sure what to say.

“That’s true!  I wish China would take care of itself. Do you think that if things with the Americans get bad enough, we’ll be able to go home? It’s been three years. That’s too long. I miss Grandma.”

“I don’t know,” Li said. He tried to remember the last visit to China he and Meili had taken together, but the memories were all jumbled together in his mind. Meili was looking at him expectantly. “I miss it too,” he added. He felt the stirrings of grief jabbing at him and started to search for a topic change, then realized he didn’t want to deflect. Not here, not to this memory of Meili, with whom he’d always shared everything.

“I…” he said. Grief made his breath short and his thoughts slow.“I really miss it,” he gasped out, and realized to his horror that he was crying. “I try not to think about it… but…it’s so dumb. I had to come into this memory just to remember you. Why do I miss something that I barely even had?”

Meili didn’t say anything, only sat with him on the ground, one hand on his shoulder, and petted his hair while he cried. She was crying a little too, as if Leigh’s nonsensical grief was somehow contagious.

“It’s not forever,” she whispered, once Leigh’s sobs had subsided enough that he could breathe again.

“No,” Li whispered. “I guess not.” He sneezed, then made a face. “I guess we were pretty happy here, huh?”

“Tranquility Lane,” Meili said with a little sigh. “It’s okay. Kind of boring.” Her face flickered like a television screen. The memory was coming to an end.

“A little,” Li said, and turned to look behind him. The house was on fire. Flames blazed from the windows and smoke billowed between the crackling wooden slats. Li hadn’t been at home when the house burned. He’d been the only surviving member of his family, and for years afterwards he’d dreamed of heat and smoke. Meili gave a shout and ran towards the door, but Li grabbed her hand and yanked her back.

“No,” he said.

“Shouldn’t we go in?” she demanded.

“No,” he repeated. “There won’t be any survivors.” The sky was beginning to crackle with static. Li and Meili stood, hand in hand, and watched the world burn.

 

Vault 111, July 17th, 2088

 

Leigh woke to the cold, still air of Vault 111 on his face and sucked in a heaving breath. Shaun was standing over him. For a dizzy moment Leigh thought he was on the operating table, and then he remembered the deal he’d made with Shaun. An hour in the memory chamber, to go back and see his family, in exchange for allowing Shaun to record the exchange. Apparently it was rare for humans to react with the memory-changing technology. No one wanted to acknowledge that they were just as programmable as the synths.

“I didn’t realize you spoke a different language when you were younger,” Shaun said. “What was that? Japanese?”

“Chinese,” Leigh said. His throat felt oddly scatchy, and he realized there were tears on his face. Ugh. He sat up in the memory pod and pushed the top aside. “I’m surprised you know about Japanese. It seems like everyone just speaks English these days.”

“There aren’t any records of you being from China,” Shaun said. Leigh snorted.

“I’m surprised there are any records left at all. Besides, I was born here. After my parents died in the fire, I went to stay with my grandparents and changed my last name. Good thing, too, because things got really dicey for Chinese people after the war broke out.”

“So you changed your face,” Shaun said. Leigh nodded. “And then, after you came out, you changed it back. I had wondered about that.”

Leigh had changed his face in Diamond City after seeing Myrna selling her wares in the Diamond City market, her asian heritage plain on her face. No one had commented. No one had cared. The man Leigh talked to in the marketplace hadn’t even known what a chink was, and his easy ignorance had turned the word to ashes in Leigh’s mouth. So many years casually badmouthing himself and his family, and for what? A world of ashes, a world in which he could finally be himself, 200 years too late for it to matter. He’d changed his face that night, unable to bear the sight of the generic white soldier in the mirror.

“Now you know, I suppose,” Leigh said. He stood up, feeling slightly dizzy, and faced the room. It was a small, minimally furnished space. One one wall, the memory pod. On the other wall, a set of cameras, and a chair. The image of Tranquility Lane was still emblazoned on the middle screen.

“Pre-war America was beautiful,” Leigh said wistfully.

“It was,” Shaun agreed. “I would have liked to see my mother. Pity your memories didn’t take you there, instead.”

“Some other time,” Leigh said. “When we’re not… here. This vault is no place for memories of Davi.” He stared morosely down at the Vault-Tec linoleum, not wanting to talk about her.

“You’ve never forgiven us for what happened to your wife,” Shaun observed. He said it as if he were talking about the weather.

“I lost something irreplaceably valuable,” Leigh said lightly. “I never forget. But I don’t blame you for it.” He looked at the floor a moment longer, playing the part of a grieving widower, then glanced up at Shaun. Shaun looked like Leigh’s father and there was no denying it, not with the memory fresh in his head. He smiled wistfully. All these years, and there was still a little part of Zhang in the world.

“You look more like my dad than I do,” Leigh remarked.

“Give it time,” Shaun said, and smiled wearily. “When I was younger, I looked like you. I always wondered. I’d tracked down a picture of Davi, but you were shut away. I could never get a good look at you, but now I know.” There was something strange in Shaun’s voice, and something stranger in the idea of his son looking for pictures of Davi. It didn’t match. His son was so unsentimental, so terribly cold, but he sounded almost wistful. Leigh felt as if he’d caught a glimpse into a distant, private world, one in which a younger Shaun had poured through Institute records, quietly searching for any trace of his family.

“Now you know,” Leigh agreed, and hesitated. He’d picked this face out of a magazine, and modified it to look like his memories of his family. After so many years of using plastic surgery to pass as a white soldier, there was no way to know what the real Leigh would have looked like. He’d met Piper and Cait soon after changing, and after that the face had stuck. Leigh didn’t like to think about it. There was barely any of the original him left.

“What was my grandfather’s name?” Shaun asked, breaking the silence. Leigh cursed himself for falling silent like an idiot. It was late, and the image of his dead family had knocked him off kilter and sent him spinning like a globe.

“Jin Zhang,” he replied. “In China, we say the family name first.”

“Zhang,” Shaun said, as if he were tasting something unfamiliar. “And your name?”

“Jin Li,” Leigh said, and then, because he couldn’t help himself, “Jin Sheng. That would have been your name. We wrote the American version down.”

“Was the similarity intentional?”

“Yes. It would have been unlucky to make them the same.”

“Superstition,” Shaun said, but not unkindly. “I suppose it cuts down on confusion. Sometimes sentiment can be useful. Good night, Leigh. I look forward to seeing the results of your reactor.”

“As do I,” Leigh said. “Good night!”

 

July 24, 2088, The Institute

 

Leigh walked into Advanced Sciences and shot the woman standing at the console. The shot was louder than Leigh would have liked, but he doubted anyone outside Advanced Systems would hear it. The rumbling of the reactor was too loud. The woman crumpled to the floor. A second woman ran in from the next room; MacCready’s friend, Maria, the one who liked comic books.

“Leigh,” she said, her eyes widening. “What’s happened to Angela?” She ran past him blindly and threw herself down beside her friend, scrabbling at her clothes to find the wound. Leigh shot her in the back of the head. He stepped past the corpse, locked the door, and returned to the console Angela had been standing at.

“You… bastard…” Angela said. Her lung whistled when she spoke. Leigh ignored her. He took the railroad thumb drive from his pocket and hooked it up to the computer. The screen flashed. The program began to upload. The Railroad had promised that it would knock out all of the gen 2 synths, and Leigh had no choice but to trust their code. He waited at the console, fingers drumming, half-afraid to hear a knock at the door.

Angela spat with great difficulty on Leigh’s boot. Leigh considered. He had nothing to do but wait; he needed all the gen 2’s to be deactivated before going into the next room. He knelt, careful to keep out of range, and surveyed the dying woman dispassionately. He thought about asking her if she’d ever thought about the kind of work Kellogg did or the collateral damage caused by the Institute’s projects, then decided against it. Someone like Angela wouldn’t care about anything that had happened outside of the Institute.

“You knew that synths were people, right?” he asked. “You had to know.” Angela’s face was white with blood loss and rage.

“What?” she gasped. “You… for that?”

“Not just you. Soon, this whole place will go up in flames.”

“Why?” Angela demanded wretchedly. Her face was white. “For those things? I...I knew… but Shaun… so sentimental!” She spat the last word like a curse. Flecks of blood covered her mouth. Leigh’s bullet had punctured a lung.

“You folks could stand to be more sentimental about the value of human life, I reckon,” Leigh said. It was his American voice. No, it was his voice, the one he’d grown into after a decade of pretending. It fit him like an old coat, fit him better than the erudite speech of an Institute scientist ever had. It was him, if there was a him left.

The computer beeped. The program was finished uploading. Leigh opened the front door of Advanced Systems and peered out into the main rotunda. The gen 2’s had all stopped moving. They stood, frozen in place, clutching mops and brooms. Leigh closed the door. Angela’s breathing had gone shallow. Leigh turned off the computer and yanked out the wires in case she found the initiative to get up after he left, and continued to the next room.

A tall man was standing at his console, headset placed over his ears. He hadn’t even heard the gunshots.

“I told you it was nothing,” he said as Leigh entered the room. Leigh shot him, though it felt like a waste of a bullet. If the people of the wasteland were savages, more animal than human being, then the people of the Institute were machines, unable to do anything other function within their limited programming. They had no conscience, no vigor, no understanding of pain. It felt good to think these thoughts after nearly two months of being Leigh Johnson, Institute scientist. It felt good to stand up straight, without the curled in walk he’d been affecting to look smaller, and it felt even better to shut to the door and turn on his pocket radio.

Somewhere in the Commonwealth, the Minutemen had caught something big and nasty and tricked it into swallowing a courser chip. When Leigh’s little radio finished sending instructions to the Institute frequency, a signal would go out, and the distraction would be transported to the inside of the SRB. One of the lights on his radio began to flash. Signal found.

There was a distant thump, as if something very heavy had just landed, and then a roar. Leigh smiled. He set the radio on the floor, cracked it under one foot, and advanced deeper into the building, gun at his side. The reactor was at a delicate stage. It wouldn’t take much to make it blow.

 

Vault 111, July 23th, 2288

 

Leigh woke from dim nightmares to the tomb-like horror of Vault 111 and switched his Pip-Boy on. Green light flooded the room. The little display proclaimed that it was 5:27 AM. Leigh had watched the little numbers tick up day by day as he toiled under the earth, dreaming of the day when he’d be able to walk side by side with MacCready in the world above, and now it was the last day. Today, they would return to the Institute. Tomorrow, the bomb would go off.

There was something very like regret in Leigh’s heart, but it would pass. It had to. It was only bad timing, his disguise peeling pieces of his skin away as he took it off. They’d warned him about Stockholm syndrome in training, but he hadn’t understood at the time. He’d been sixteen and freshly bereaved and furious and he hadn’t believed it was possible that he would ever grow attached to an American.

He shifted in bed, the sweaty sheets clinging unpleasantly to his bare skin, and resigned himself to getting up. He hated the vault, hated the darkness, the claustrophobic rooms, the way no one could ever escape from anyone else even for a moment. He hoisted his Pip-Boy, grabbed his knife from under his pillow just for the security, and crept down the hall to the water fountain.

There was another set of footsteps, walking just out of sync with his. Leigh kept his pace steady, pulled his Pip-Boy up as if he meant to fiddle with the controls, and activated VATS. A halo in the shape of a man appeared, startlingly close. Where features and percentages should have appeared, there was nothing; only a black void. There was something about the courser uniforms that interfered with video surveillance. Leigh wondered whether the Institute knew. He wondered if the coursers knew.

“Sir.” The voice emanated from empty air, as if the darkness itself were greeting him. “You’re up early.”

“Bad dreams,” Leigh muttered, his pulse thudding wildly. He felt like a fool. Ayo would no doubt be receiving a report that Leigh had been sneaking around at midnight with a knife. “Just getting some water.”

“Of course, sir.” Leigh waited for the thing to move, but there was nothing. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. He turned slightly, getting his back to the wall, and glanced sideways. There was a second shape in the darkness at the end of the hall. Leigh’s heart began to hammer again.

“You knew I was here,” the courser said, something like curiosity in its voice. “How?”

“Good instincts, I guess,” Leigh said. “Could you get me some water from the kitchen? A large bottle, please.” He waited, heart thudding. A moment of hesitation, when he thought the thing wasn’t going to agree, and then it turned. He watched it go until it slipped around a corner, out of the range of VATS. The shape behind him had vanished. He glanced upwards, half expecting something to be dangling from the ceiling, but there was nothing. He hurried back to his room and flipped on his desk lamp.

A courser was sitting on his bed.

“Hgggk,” Leigh said.

“Relax,” A6 said.

“Oh, yes, that’s very relaxing,” Leigh snapped. “What do you want?”

“Just checking on on you,” she said.

“Oh, lovely.” A6 was the Railroad’s contact in the Institute, and also one of the most infuriating people he’d ever dealt with in all his years of spying. There were no levers A6 could be moved with. She was nearly a hundred years old, with the reflexes of a cat, the mind of a general, and the whims of a toddler. As far as Leigh could tell she’d taken up spying simply because she’d done everything else a courser could do and wanted to try something new.

She sat on the bed, watching him with that calm, patient expression common to all coursers. The expression was a goad, but one Leigh’s couldn’t help but respond to. He was tired. The aftereffects of crippling terror were making themselves known.

“So,” he snapped. “Are you here to kill me, or was he?” A6’s lips curled into a feral grin.

“He was, I think. He didn’t expect you to be out in the hallway. Lucky lucky. Even better that I was on patrol.” Leigh responded with an appropriate noise of disgust.

“Is he going to kill me now?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Well, fuck him. I’m going to sleep.” He walked over, scrunched himself into the space between A6 and the wall, and closed his eyes. A6 didn’t move. Her weight was like a wall. Well, fuck her. He’d slept in more cramped conditions.

“Are you opportuning me?” A6 asked.

“I have a boyfriend,” Leigh said flatly. “Also, you’d snap my dick off.” This got a laugh from A6.

“You have good instincts, and you’re loyal,” she said thoughtfully. “But I like your boyfriend much better than I like you.” Leigh’s heartbeat kicked back up again. He forced himself to breathe evenly. A6 laughed again.

“Don’t bother. I can hear your heartbeat, you know.”

“Bullshit,” snapped Leigh. That couldn’t possibly be fucking true. There was too much noise inside of a human body. A6 just turned towards him and smiled her cat’s grin.

“Why’d you change the plan? You weren’t thinking of the poor little synths when you came in, or you would have brought different equipment and made nice with the Railroad more. When you came in, you were thinking of something else.”

“I was thinking about what MacCready looks like naked,” Leigh growled. He didn’t add that in his imagination MacCready had also been dead, his corpse made anonymous by the marks of violence. A6 let out a low whistle.

“Sure, sure. Really, though. Why’d you do it? A guy like you, you could be happy here.”

“They killed my wife,” Leigh said. A6 flopped down beside him on the bed.

“Kellogg killed your wife,” she said. “Shaun is your son. He’s family.”

“No, he’s not,” Leigh said, his mouth running on automatic. There was something about A6 that made him stupid with terror. “Why are you interrogating me?” A6 turned to face him, propping her head up with one hand.

“Well, you hate it, which makes it kind of fun. Also, I’m waiting for K2 to get back from the kitchen.” She did not add that Leigh was an untrustworthy fucker who had given the Railroad very little reason to cooperate with him, but Leigh heard it in her voice. He started to retort, then snapped his mouth shut. He didn’t need to talk.

“Ah, well.” She sprang back into a seated position, then leaned back and put one hand comfortably around Leigh’s throat. If she hadn’t been able to hear his heartbeat before, she’d be able to feel it now. Leigh’s heart was going like a jackhammer.

“One last question, and then I’ll leave you alone. How come Shaun isn’t your family?” Leigh stared at her.

“I-I don’t know,” he said stupidly.

“Hmmm,” A6 said. He hand tightened even so slightly. “Oh well. Time’s up! Here, let me get the door for you.” She marched to the door, which opened on a dumbfounded K2. A6 snatched a water bottle from the other courser’s hand, tossed it casually over her shoulder and left. The door shut with a hiss, and Leigh was left in brief, blessed silence.

He exhaled. The waterbottle A6 had tossed completed its arc and landed base first on Leigh’s nightstand. Leigh picked it up, his eyes still fixed on the door, and unscrewed the top of the water bottle with shaking hands. There was a muffled thump in the corridor. A6 had locked the door on her way out. A dent appeared in the harsh metal. Leigh put down the water, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to sleep.

 

July 24, 2288, The Institute

 

Leigh woke up slowly, despite the urgency of the situation. His senses filtered in piece by piece: the soft sound of MacCready’s breathing, the warm weight of his body, the smell of alcohol and sex. Leigh’s eyelids fluttered. He forced them to open. MacCready looked so fucking young when he was asleep, and he clung sleepily to Leigh’s arm. Leigh wanted to do everything in the world with him. Instead he ran one hand over the arches of MacCready’s cheekbones and gently extracted himself from the warm bed, then walked over to the bathroom. (It gave him a terrible tender feeling in his chest to think about how skinny MacCready was, how little padding life had given him.)

He splashed some water on his face and tried to collect himself. His reflection in the mirror stared sleepily back at him; he studied it reflectively and then winked. His hair was a wild mess, his mismatched eyes narrow with sleep, and there was a bite mark on the side of his neck. He looked more like one of the models from his mother’s glossy Chinese magazines than a mass murderer.

Leigh hadn’t thought much of his face until he’d met Davi. He’d never been in love before her, had never understood how much work beauty could do for a person. He’d thought it was his words, or his smiles, or his anything. Anything other than the face that wasn’t even his, the one his superiors had picked out of a catalog. This face was better. It looked a little like his father, and a little like his mother, but mostly it looked like him.

In forty years, he would look like Shaun. He’d deal with it then.

He walked over to Duncan, sleeping comfortably in his little bed. Shaun had been less than a year old when they’d taken him; Duncan was much older than that. He was a little person, one with a personality. Leigh looked down at him and thought of the empty spot where his future with Davi should have gone, of the stranger with his son’s name, of the faded photographs on the walls of his parents’ house in DC.

Then he went and got a cup of coffee. It was warm and bitter and it tasted like the last remnants of pre-war America. He sipped it while writing out his instructions to MacCready, then set the cup aside while he folded the instructions into the stealth suit. He set the whole thing on the sink, where MacCready wouldn’t be able to avoid finding it, and turned on the shower. His fingers lingered on the glass. He would regret destroying the Institute. He hadn’t thought he would, but there it was. People naturally regretted destroying beautiful things, but sometimes it was obligatory. Some things were more important than clean lines and hot water.

No one is obliging you, he thought, and then he thought of Davi. A smile tugged at his lips. She had understood revenge better than Leigh ever would; every action he’d taken from the moment his father died to the moment he emerged blinking into the post-war world had been for the cause. He’d gone into the program thinking of his father and come out thinking about China and the war. He’d been reprogrammed just like a courser and never even realized it. But Davi, Davi hadn’t lived for a cause. She’d lived for herself without apology, taking revenge and dispensing mercy as she saw fit.

You’re going to kill these people, he imagined her saying. Now take responsibility, but not for them. You are the only person you are accountable for. Now, stop waiting and go!

Yes, dear, Leigh thought. An image came to him, clear as day: Davi standing in the kitchen, regarding him with a fond smile. She glanced towards the door, as if to tell him to get a move on, and turned away, her short hair fluttering with the quick motion. Someone knocked at the door, and the illusion vanished. Leigh rose, coffee cup still in hand, and answered it, curious. It was Shaun.

“Good morning,” Leigh said, and remembered that he was in his boxers. Shaun looked amused.

“I seem to have interrupted your morning ritual,” he said.

“What is it?” Leigh asked. “There’s not a problem with the reactor, is there?” His cover would be worried about the results of his work, he decided. It wouldn’t give him away if he let a little anxiety show. Shaun smiled indulgently.

“No, no everything’s fine. I just wanted to talk. Perhaps in a few minutes?”

“By all means,” Leigh said. “Just, uh, let me get some pants on.” He closed the door, took a deep breath, and resisted the urge to scream. Okay, he thought. Ace has already programmed the reactor to send MacCready back here. The distraction comes in later on my signal. There are only three things left to do; instructions, surveillance cover, and materials. Instructions and cover are done; I just need to finish with materials. His pulse was racing wildly; he forced himself to stop and breathe before continuing his preparations. I’ve done this before, he thought. I can do it again.

He left some stimpacks and Rad-X for MacCready, slipped his pistol into the back of his outfit, and went out to meet Shaun. Don’t think, he instructed himself. Don’t try to cover, don’t deflect. Just be you, the person you’ve always been since arriving in the Institute.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Leigh said. If Shaun noticed the wisps of steam escaping from the room, it didn’t show on his face. There wasn’t a courser accompanying him. “What’s up?”

“You’re sprightly, considering the amount of alcohol you had last night.” Leigh didn’t need to fake his sheepish grin.

“I was excited,” he said. “It’s my first big project here, you know. Besides, everyone was so enthusiastic, and I got carried away.”

“I see that,” Shaun replied. “When I was younger… I still remember the night before my first project went live. I stayed up so late going over my notes I slept through my alarm twice.” Shaun was wandering in the direction of his office. Leigh followed, curious.

“I have trouble imagining you being nervous about anything,” Leigh admitted.

“It was a long time ago,” Shaun said. “Things are more urgent when you’re young. When you get older, you start to understand that some things are preordained. At this point, the next surprise for me will be my death.”

Leigh tried without much success to cover his confusion and dismay. Did Shaun know? Shaun laughed at him, then placed a hand on his arm.

“You must know that I am sick,” he said. “We’ll discuss it more in my office.” They walked up to Shaun’s apartment in silence. Leigh’s mind was blank. The mission had started. The time for thinking was over.

“I had been planning to announce it at a meeting, but I decided against it. It can wait until after your reactor comes online. I want everyone in the Institute to know what you’ve done when I make my announcement. I want you to follow me as the leader of the Institute.”

“What?” Leigh said. It took him a moment to churn through the shock in his mind. “Exactly how sick are you?” he asked slowly.

“Very sick, I’m afraid,” Shaun said. He peered at Leigh, curiosity in his eyes. “I hadn’t realized you’d grown so attached to me.” Leigh realized his dismay had to be showing.

“It’s a bit of a surprise,” he said, trying to school his features back into place. He forced himself to consider the prospect. “I think I could do a good job, but will the other department heads accept that?”

“What do you think?” Shaun asked. A test, then, to see how good Leigh’s sense of the Institute was.

“Clayton and Alan like me well enough, and Allie and Ayo only want the position to prevent each other from getting it. Madison doesn’t care about what happens outside of her department. Ayo doesn’t like me, but he respects my experience with the surface. I could do it.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t thought of it,” Shaun said. “You’re one of the only candidates. You have an ability that exceeds even mine to make people listen to you. Considering your empire-building on the surface, I would have expected you to be more ambitious.” There was a little reproach in his voice.

“I’ve been thinking about the project,” Leigh said. He realized he’d been avoiding looking Shaun in the eyes and raised his head. Now that he knew about Shaun’s illness, it was obvious in his face, in the weary lines around his eyes and the tremble of his hands. The shock of seeing what Shaun had become had robbed Leigh of the ability to look at him and see anything other than failure, but now, for the first time, he was able to see the old man his son had become. Shaun was smiling.

“Ah, Leigh,” he said. “I know a politician when I see one. You didn’t go to all those talks and neglect your precious boyfriend because you were dying to hear what Alana thinks about waste management. You decided the day you came here that you were going to belong, just like I did.”

“Do you remember…” Leigh started to say. The question stuck in his throat. Do you remember coming here, he wanted to ask, but it was impossible. Shaun had been so young when they took him.  

“I remember being different,” Shaun replied. “The other children all had parents. None of them were raised by mercenaries and coursers, or ever had their blood taken for lab samples. I was unique, as you are unique. I resented it at first. The Institute had taken my parents from me. But in time, I came to realize that the cause of the Institute was more important than any personal tragedy.” Leigh didn’t know what to say. His real self was poking through the holes of his cover, or his cover was bleeding back into him.

“I suppose it runs in the family,” he managed at last.

“Why are you so dismayed, Leigh?” Shaun asked. Leigh’s response tumbled from his lips, immediate and unvarnished, and he only realized after the fact that it was true.

“You were my son once, but we missed the chance to be family. You and I, we’re similar. But we’ll never know how similar, because you’re going to die.”

“I am,” Shaun said. “It's not the usual order of things, for sons to leave things to their fathers. But I am afraid we will have to make do. This is the only family I’ve ever had, Leigh; the people of the Institute. I entrust them to you.”Leigh leaned forward, and the gun hidden in his coat shifted. He remembered abruptly who he was, and what he was planning to do, what he had already done. Some things are preordained, Shaun had said, not knowing that Leigh had already begun the countdown to the end of the Institute.

Leigh took a moment to gather his words, then spoke.

“I wish with all my heart that we’d met differently, but I’m glad that at last our personal lives and our principles can finally be in accord. It would be my pleasure to succeed you as leader of the Institute. I promise you, I will do my best to ensure that the Institute receives the leadership it deserves.”

Shaun smiled. There was an awful relief in his face. It wouldn’t be long now before he died, even if Leigh did nothing. A week, at at the most. He extended his hand. Leigh shook it.

“I’m glad, that after all this time, we were finally able to be honest with each other.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [shows up three months late to my own fic with a birthday hat]


End file.
